THE HAITI HITMEN
17 handcuffed foreign mercenaries paraded by police after president assassinated in his home
A HIT squad of foreign mercenaries was paraded on TV in Haiti after being captured following the assassination of the nation’s president.
The heavily-armed commando unit suspected of killing president Jovenel Moise in his home was composed of 26 Colombians and two Haitian Americans, authorities said.
The hunt for the masterminds of the killing continues.
Mr Moise, 53, was shot a dozen times early on Wednesday in his bedroom at his heavily-guarded official residence by what officials called a group of foreign, trained killers. Police chief Leon Charles paraded 17 captured suspects at a news conference on Thursday.
A number of Colombian passports, assault rifles, machetes, walkie-talkies and items including bolt cutters and hammers were also shown to journalists.
‘Foreigners came to our country to kill the president,’ Mr Charles said as the men sat handcuffed on the floor behind him. ‘We are going to bring them to justice.’
He said 15 Colombians, including retired soldiers, as well as two Haitian Americans were captured.
Four suspects were shot dead and the rest are on the run.
In the hours after the brazen killing, authorities tracked some of the suspected assassins to a suburb of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
A firefight lasted late into the night, leaving four men dead and others in custody.
And on Thursday special forces launched a raid on the Taiwan embassy and detained more susmore
‘Well-equipped commando unit’
pects after 11 of the alleged killers had broken in to hide.
In Port-au-Prince, witnesses said an angry crowd discovered two suspects hiding in bushes and roughed them up before police arrived.
As the pair were driven away in the back of a pick-up truck, the crowd ran behind screaming: ‘They killed the president! Give them to us! We’re going to burn them.’
Several of the Colombians are thought to have arrived in the neighbouring Dominican Republic on June 4 before slipping over the border into Haiti two days later.
Officials in the mostly French and Creole-speaking Caribbean nation said the assassins spoke in English and Spanish. ‘It was a full, wellequipped commando unit, with than six cars and a lot of equipment,’ government minister Mathias Pierre said. The Haitian Americans were identified as James Solages, 35,
a former bodyguard at the Canadian Embassy in Port-au-Prince, and 55year-old Joseph Vincent.
An investigating judge told local media yesterday the pair claim they were acting as translators for the mercenaries, having answered a job advert online.
‘The mission was to arrest President Jovenel Moise... and not to kill him,’ Judge Clement Noel told Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper.
Some in Haiti are questioning the official account of the assassination, asking how a team of sophisticated attackers could penetrate Moise’s home, security detail and panic
‘Bring them to justice’
room, and escape unharmed but be caught without planning a successful getaway. Officials have not yet given a motive for the killing.
Since taking office in 2017, Mr Moise had faced mass protests against his rule – first over corruption allegations and his management of the economy, then over his increasing grip on power.
Some suggested yesterday he was killed after taking on local ‘oligarchs’. Mr Moise’s death has now generated confusion about who is the legitimate leader of the country of 11million people, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.
The head of the Haitian Supreme Court died last month from Covid.
There is no sitting parliament as elections scheduled for late 2019 were delayed amid political unrest. Mr Moise this week appointed a new prime minister, Ariel Henry, to take over, but he had yet to be sworn in when the president was killed.