Haitian gang kills 110 people, leader accused of being a witch
At least 110 mostly elderly people were brutally murdered by gang members in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, according to a human rights group.
The National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH) said a local gang leader targeted them after his son fell ill and later died.
The gang leader is said to have consulted a voodoo priest who blamed local elders practicing “witchcraft” for the boy’s mysterious illness.
The United Nations says the number of people killed in Haiti this year due to rising gang violence has reached “a staggering 5,000”.
Warning: This story contains details that some readers may find disturbing
While details of the massacre are still emerging, United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday gave the death toll over the weekend “in violence by the leader of orchestrated by a powerful gang” is 184.
The murder occurred in the capital’s Cité Soleil neighborhood.
According to reports, gang members seized dozens of residents over 60 years old from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area, rounded them up, and used knives and machetes to shoot or stab them to death.
Residents reported seeing mutilated bodies burned in the streets.
RNDDH estimated 60 people were killed on Friday while another 50 were rounded up and murdered on Saturday, after the gang leader’s son died of illness.
While RNDDH said all the victims were over 60 years old, another human rights group said several young people who tried to protect the elderly were also killed.
Local media said the elders believed to be black magic practitioners were singled out because the gang leader was informed that his son’s illness was caused by them.
Human rights groups said the person who ordered the killing was Monel Felix, also known as Mikano.
Mikano is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic area in the capital’s port.
According to Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Haitian expert at the Global Initiative to Combat Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but difficult for security forces to penetrate.
Local media said people were prevented from leaving Wharf Jérémie by Mikano’s gang, so news of the deadly murder was slow to spread.
The group is part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls much of the Haitian capital.
Haiti has been engulfed in a wave of gang violence since the 2021 assassination of then-president Jovenel Moïse.
Data collected by GI-TOC shows the murder rate fell between May and September this year, after rival gangs reached an uneasy truce.
However, the gangs’ efforts to expand their territory beyond their stronghold in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the past two months, leaving ordinary people but not members of the capital. Rival gang members increasingly become targets.
On October 3, 115 locals were killed in the small town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite region.
That massacre was allegedly carried out by the Gran Grif gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist Gran Grif’s attempts to extort money from locals.
If confirmed, the death toll given by the United Nations for this weekend’s killings in Cité Soleil would make it the deadliest incident so far this year.
With gangs controlling about 85% of Port-au-Prince and increasingly large areas of the countryside, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been forced to flee their homes.
According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 700,000 people – half of them children – are internally displaced across the country.
Gang members often engage in sexual abuse, including gang rape, to spread terror among the local population.
In a report published two weeks agoHuman Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino wrote that “the law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal groups rape women without fear of any consequences”.
Efforts by the Kenya-led Multinational Security Assistance Mission to quell the violence have so far failed.
International police forces arrived in Haiti in June to support the Haitian National Police but lacked the funding and equipment needed to confront heavily armed gangs.
Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) – the body established to organize elections and restore democratic order – appears to be in chaos.
The TPC replaced the interim prime minister last month and appears to have made little progress in holding elections.
“They reign over mountains of ashes,” GI-TOC’s Romain Le Cour Grandmaison wrote of the council in his report.