Haiti gang kills 110 people accused of witchcraft
At least 110 mostly elderly individuals have been brutally killed by gang members in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, according to a human rights organization.
The National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH) reported that the victims were targeted by a local gang leader following the illness and subsequent death of his son.
The gang leader allegedly sought the counsel of a voodoo priest, who claimed that elderly locals practicing “witchcraft” were responsible for the boy’s mysterious ailment.
The United Nations has stated that the death toll from gang violence in Haiti this year has reached a shocking 5,000.
While details of the massacre continue to emerge, UN human rights chief Volker Türk confirmed on Monday that 184 people were killed over the weekend in violence attributed to the leader of a powerful gang.
The killings took place in the Cité Soleil area of the capital.
Reports indicate that gang members forcibly took numerous residents aged over 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie district, gathered them together, and then shot or stabbed them with knives and machetes.
Witnesses described seeing mutilated bodies set ablaze in the streets.
RNDDH estimates that 60 people were killed on Friday, and another 50 were executed on Saturday following the gang leader’s son’s death.
While RNDDH said that all the victims were over 60, another rights group said some younger people who had tried to protect the elderly had also been killed.
Local media said that elderly people believed to be practitioners of voodoo had been singled out because the gang leader had been told his son’s illness had been caused by them.
Rights groups said the man who had ordered the killings was Monel Felix, also known as Mikano.
Mikano is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic area in the port of the capital.
According to Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but hard for the security forces to penetrate.
Local media said that residents had been prevented from leaving Wharf Jérémie by Mikano’s gang, so news of the deadly killings was slow to spread.
The group forms 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 assassination in 2021 of the then-president, Jovenel Moïse.
Data gathered by GI-TOC shows there was a decline in the murder rate between May and September of this year, after rival gangs had reached an uneasy truce.
But attempts by the gangs to expand their territory beyond their strongholds in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the past two months, with ordinary residents rather than rival gang members being increasingly targeted.
On 3 October, 115 locals were killed in the small town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite department.
That massacre was reportedly carried out by the Gran Grif gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist attempts by Gran Grif to extort locals.
If confirmed, the death toll given by the UN for this weekend’s killings in Cité Soleil, would make it the deadliest incident so far this year.
With gangs in control of an estimated 85% of Port-au-Prince and increasingly large swathes 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 use sexual abuse, including gang rape, to sow terror among the local population.
In a report published two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino wrote that “the rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal groups rape girls of women without fearing any consequences”.
Attempts by the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission to quell the violence have so far failed.
The international police force arrived in Haiti in June to bolster the Haitian National Police but is underfunded and lacks the necessary equipment to take on the heavily armed gangs.
Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) – the body created to organise elections and re-establish democratic order – appears to be in turmoil.
The TPC replaced the interim prime minister last month and seems to have made little progress towards organising elections.
“They reign over a mountain of ashes,” GI-TOC’s Romain Le Cour Grandmaison writes of the council in his report.
