El Salvador police are probing whether a man representing 10 Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti is the same person sought in the Central American nation for human trafficking, a statement said Saturday.

El Salvador police said they were working to determine if Jorge Torres Orellana could be Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, who has been presented as a Dominican lawyer for the Americans.

They reopened the case after photos of Puello emerged in international media, the statement said, and police are now comparing them with pictures in their records. The story first emerged in The New York Times .

El Salvador police have posted the photos on their website.

"For the moment, we cannot confirm that it is the same person until we finish analyzing fingerprints," the statement said.

The statement added that they were working with Interpol on the case.

On Saturday, the international police organization issued a wanted persons alert for Orellana, 32, Interpol said.

It said he was a Salvadoran national accused of running an international sex trafficking ring that lured women and girls from the Caribbean and Central America into prostitution with bogus offers of modeling jobs.

'Colombian drug dealer had my name'

Puello was in Port-au-Prince for one of the Americans' court appearances earlier this week. He did not return a message left for him on Saturday.

He told The New York Times that "I don’t have anything to do with El Salvador," and suggested his name was common in Latin America.

"There’s a Colombian drug dealer who was arrested with 25 IDs, and one of them had my name," he told the newspaper.

The 10 Americans from the New Life Children's Refuge were caught in the wake of Haiti's massive earthquake trying to take a busload of children they said they thought were orphans across the border into the Dominican Republican.

After it emerged the children had parents, the Americans' lawyers have sought to portray the Baptists as acting selflessly to help during Haiti's catastrophe. They say the group had no criminal intent.

Some of the parents have told the judge in the case they willingly gave up their children because they were unable to care for them following the devastation wrought by the January 12 disaster.

Haitian judicial officials are considering whether to grant the Americans provisional release. They have been held at a police station in the capital since January 29.

- AFP