Police stand among a crowd to protest the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Mosse, near the police station of Petion Ville in Port-au-Prince
Haiti’s interim government said on Friday it asked the US to deploy troops to protect key infrastructure as it tries to stabilize the country and prepare the way for elections following the assassination of President Jovanel Mosse. .
“We certainly need assistance and we have sought help from our international partners,” Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph told The Associated Press in an interview. “We are confident that our allies can assist the National Police in resolving the situation.”
Joseph said he was frustrated with opponents who tried to take advantage of Mosse’s assassination to seize political power – an indirect reference to a group of lawmakers declaring his loyalty and the head of Haiti’s disbanded Senate, Joseph. Lambert as provisional president and Ariel Henry, who had been nominated by Moise as prime minister the day before his assassination.
Without naming Lambert, Joseph said in a brief phone interview, “I have no interest in the power struggle.” “There is only one way people can become president in Haiti. And that is through elections.”
Joseph said the Colombian police chief just hours after he said that Colombians implicated in Mosse’s murder had been recruited by four companies and had traveled through the Dominican Republic to the Caribbean nation in two groups. Meanwhile, the US said it would send senior officials from the FBI and Homeland Security to help with the investigation.
Haitian national police chief Leon Charles said 17 suspects had been detained in the brutal murder of Mosse, which stunned a country already ravaged by poverty, widespread violence and political instability.
As the investigation progressed, the murder took the form of a complex international conspiracy. In addition to Colombians, among those detained by police were two Haitian Americans, who have been described as translators of the attackers. Some of the suspects were caught in a raid on the Taiwan embassy, where they are believed to have sought asylum.
At a news conference in Bogota, the Colombian capital, General Jorge Luis Vargas Valencia said that four companies were involved in the “recruitment, gathering of these people” involved in the murder, although he did not identify the companies as their names were still to be had. Relationship verified.
Two of the suspects traveled to Haiti via Panama and the Dominican Republic, Vargas said, while a second group of 11 reached Haiti on July 4 from the Dominican Republic.
In Washington, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said senior officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would be sent to Haiti “as soon as possible to assess the situation and how we may be able to assist”.
“The United States is engaged in supporting the Haitian people following the assassination of the president and is in close consultation with our Haitian and international partners,” Saki said.
Following Haiti’s request for US troops, a senior administration official reiterated Saki’s earlier comments that the administration was sending officials to assess how it could be most helpful, but said that at this time the military There are no plans to provide assistance.
The US sent troops to Haiti at the hands of an angry mob who raided the French embassy, where they had sought asylum, after the country’s last assassination, the assassination of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915.
In Haiti, national police chief Leon Charles said eight other suspects were still on the run and were being sought.
Investigative Judge Clément Nol told French-language newspaper Le Nouveliste that the arrested Haitian Americans, James Solages and Joseph Vincent, said the attackers had originally only planned to arrest Mosse, not kill him. Noel said that Soulage and Vincent were acting as translators for the attackers.
The same newspaper quoted Port-au-Prince prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude as saying he ordered an investigative unit of the National Police Force to question all security agents close to Mosse. These include Jean Laguel Civil, Moise’s security coordinator, and Dimitri Herrard, head of the National Palace’s general security unit.
“If you are responsible for the President’s security, where were you? What did you do to avoid this fate of the President?” Claude said.
His wife, who was also taken to Miami for treatment, was also seriously injured in an attack on Mose’s home before dawn on Wednesday.
Joseph assumed leadership with the support of the police and military and declared a two-week “state of siege”. Port-au-Prince is already on edge amid a growing force of gangs that displaced more than 14,700 people in the last month alone as they torched and ransacked homes in fighting in the area.
The assassination stalled the usually bustling capital, but Joseph urged the public to return to work.
Vargas has promised Colombia’s full cooperation, and officials there identified 13 of the 15 Colombians trapped in the attack as retired members of the military, 11 captured and two killed. They range in rank from lieutenant colonel to soldier.
The commander of the Colombian Armed Forces, General Luis Fernando Navarro, said he had left the institute between 2018 and 2020.
“In the criminal world, there is the concept of murder for hire and this is what happened: they hired some members of the (military) reserve for this purpose and they have to answer criminally for the acts they have committed, Retired Colombian Army General Jaime Ruiz Barrera.
Senior officials from Colombian security forces will travel to Haiti to help with the investigation.
US-trained Colombian soldiers are heavily recruited by private security firms in global conflict zones because of their experience in decades-long wars against left-wing rebels and powerful drug cartels.
The wife of a detained former Colombian soldier said she was recruited by a security firm to travel to the Dominican Republic last month.
The woman, who identified herself only as “Yuli”, told Colombia’s W Radio that her husband, Francisco Uribe, was hired by a company called CTU for $2,700 a month to travel to the Dominican Republic. where he was told that he would provide security. Some powerful families. She says she last spoke to him at 10 p.m. Wednesday, about a day after Moose’s murder, and said he was on guard duty at the house where he and others were staying.
“The next day he wrote me a message that seemed like a farewell,” said the woman. “They were on the run, they were attacked. …that was my last contact.”
The woman said she knew little about her husband’s activities and was unaware that he had even traveled to Haiti.
Uribe is under investigation for his alleged role in extra-judicial killings by Colombia’s US-trained military more than a decade ago. Colombian court records show that he and another soldier were charged in 2008 with the murder of a civilian, whom they later tried to pose as a war criminal.
The CTU in question may be CTU Security in Miami-Dade. There are two listed addresses on the business’s website. There was a closed warehouse with no indication to whom it belonged. The other is a simple office under a different company name where the receptionist says the CTU owner comes once a week to pick up meals and hold meetings occasionally.
Solges, 35, described himself as a “certified diplomatic agent,” an advocate for children and a charity for the budding politician, on a now-deleted website he founded in 2019 in his home town of Jacmel in South Florida. To assist the resident of Coast.
Soláges also said that he worked as a bodyguard at the Canadian Embassy in Haiti, and on his Facebook page, which was also deleted after news of his arrest, posted pictures of armored military vehicles and in front of a Showed a shot of himself standing. American Flag.
Canada’s Department of Foreign Relations issued a statement that did not mention Solez by name, but said that one of the people detained for his alleged role in the murder had been sent to his embassy by a private contractor. Briefly employed as a reserve bodyguard”.
Calls to the charity and to Soulage’s affiliates remained unanswered. However, a relative in South Florida said Solages had no military training and did not believe he was involved in the murder.
“I feel like my son killed my brother because I love our president and I love James Soulage,” Schubert Dorisme, whose wife is Soulage’s aunt, told WPLG in Miami.
Taiwan’s embassy in Port-au-Prince said police had arrested 11 people who tried to enter the compound in the early hours of Thursday. It gave no details of their identity or the reason for the break-in, but in a statement referred to the men as “mercenaries” and strongly condemned Mosey’s “brutal and barbaric killing”.
“As far as the suspect was involved in the assassination of Haiti’s president, it should be investigated by Haitian police,” foreign affairs spokesman Joan O told the Associated Press in Taipei.
Police were alerted by embassy security while Taiwanese diplomats were working from home. Haiti is one of the few countries that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
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