PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – America has quietly given thousands of guns to the Haitian National Police and is moving to approve the sale of thousands more despite a 14-year arms embargo and allegations the force is corrupt, brutal, and responsible for unjustified killings, American, U.N., and Haitian officials said this week.

The officials said police are outgunned by gangsters and must be better armed. America gave 2,600 used firearms to the Haitian National Police last year to help re-equip and professionalize the force, according to State Department and U.N. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The State Department is preparing to notify Congress that it wants to permit American companies to sell the Haitian police $1.9 million worth of equipment, including 3,000 .38-caliber pistols, several hundred rifles and shotguns, and non-lethal equipment for crowd control, the spokesman said.

Such sales come under regulations imposed after the 1991 overthrow of President Aristide that bar weapons sales except “in a case of exceptional or undue hardship, or when it is otherwise in the interest of the United States government.”

Mr. Aristide pleaded to have the embargo lifted after 20,000 U.S. troops returned him to power in 1994. But American officials cited the police force’s links to cocaine trafficking and extrajudicial killings of government opponents – charges still made today by human-rights groups despite a change of government.

Mr. Aristide was ousted again in February 2004.

American and U.N. officials said that since the installation of an interim government, they have been working to bolster a revamped police force outgunned by politically aligned gangs that attack police and U.N. peacekeepers with high-powered weapons.