Chaos follows Haiti president’s assassination

Ex-special forces soldiers from Colombia detained

Port-au-prince, Haiti The attackers raided the private compound of Haiti’s president before dawn, yelling “DEA operation!” and wielding high-caliber weapons. They tied up a maid and houseboy and ransacked Jovenel Moise’s office and bedroom.

When it was over, Moise lay sprawled on his bedroom floor. He had been shot in the forehead, chest, hip and stomach, and his left eye was gouged.

By the time the sun rose, the suspects had scattered by car and foot, leaving this country of more than 11 million in shock. People tuned into radio stations, some still in disbelief until gruesome photos began to circulate on social media.

“I’m not saying he was a good person, but he didn’t deserve death,” said a woman named Sandra, who lived across the street from the president’s mansion. She and her son and husband squeezed into a shower in the back of their home when they heard gunshots echoing through the Pelerin neighborhood.

Sandra, who declined to give her last name for fear of being killed, thought it was Haitian gang members who had been threatening to take over the area until she heard someone yell in English: “Go! Go! Go!”

Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph said the July 7 attack was carried out by a highly trained and heavily armed group. Details are scarce, but Associated Press interviews with investigators and witnesses give a sense of the terror and chaos of that night.

So far, police have detained more than 20 suspects they say were directly involved in the killing, including a contingent of former Colombian special forces soldiers. Other suspects were killed by authorities as they closed in.

None of the president’s security guards were hurt. The president’s daughter hid in her brother’s bedroom and survived, Carl Henry Destin, a deputy peace justice, told the AP as he confirmed details of that night.

Shortly after the slaying, several of the Colombians hid in a two-story business that once sold furniture on a narrow, hilly road just a few minutes’ drive from Moise’s house.

One Colombian texted his sister from the business around 6:30 a.m. “Things had gotten complicated,” Duberney Capador wrote Yenny Capador.

Half an hour later, her phone beeped with another message: “We are under attack.”

She said Capador told her police were firing at them and that they were trying to talk to authorities and turn themselves in. Then he went silent for several hours and later turned up dead, his body badly bruised.

At least three soldiers were killed in the shootout that blew out all the store’s windows.

Among those killed was Mauricio Javier Romero. His wife, Giovanna Romero, told the AP that she last spoke to him at 9:30 p.m. on July 6, just hours before the attack on the president. She told him that she and their son were putting on their pajamas and getting ready for bed. He responded that they didn’t have power or internet and that they had turned on a generator. So he took advantage of the electricity and called her.

“He then told me, ‘Say hi to the boy. I love you very much. A kiss. We’ll talk as soon as I can,’“she said. “That was it.”

The suspects who survived the gunfire are believed to have fled through the back part of the building. They climbed over 40 stairs, stepped through a small garbage dump and scaled a towering wall of concrete blocks. On the other side, a short distance down a road in an highend community, they found another potential hideout: the Taiwanese Embassy.

Taiwanese diplomats were working from home at the time, and embassy security guards alerted Haitian police that a group of armed suspects were breaking through some doors and window.

The remaining suspects fled to nearby areas, some hiding in bushes and other places until a group of Haitians found them and roughed them up, in some cases slapping them. In one neighborhood, civilians bound the suspects’ arms with rope and forced them to walk while someone yelled “Move! Move!” until they reached a spot where police arrived and arrested them.

In a nearby community, a crowd chased after two suspects and detained them. Police took the pair away in the back of a pickup. Some in the crowd followed to the police station demanding the attackers be given to them.

“They killed the president!“they chanted. “Give them to us. We’re going to burn them!”

The crowd later set fire to cars that had no license plates that they thought suspects abandoned near the shootout. The government said this destroyed valuable evidence.