More than two dozen gang members were killed by police and members of the public after residents in the country’s Pétion-Ville neighborhood woke up Tuesday to panic and armed bandits in their midst.
The attempted attack on the tony residential suburb of Port-au-Prince, which has tried to shield itself from the capital’s murderous gangs, unleashed a response from residents not seen since April of last year when people from the Canape Vert neighborhood of Port-au-Prince hunted down and set fire to suspected gang members trying to invade their community.
At least 28 suspected gang members have been killed, police spokesman Lionel Lazarre told the Miami Herald, as residents sheltered in place and all of Pétion-Ville remained on lockdown.
“For the moment, the police are continuing to carry out operations,” he said.
Lazarre said he did not know yet where the gang members, who for days had been threatening to invade the community, were from. Police and members of the Kenya-led multinational security mission had been on heightened alert now for days amid the threats and constant gun battles around Port-au-Prince.
At least 10 gang members were killed by police and “by the residents who gave themselves justice” after a truck the gang members were traveling in, came across a police checkpoint near the Oasis Hotel on Panamerican Avenue, he said. “There was an exchange of gunfire and the gang members fled,” Lazarre said.
Corpses, cut apart with machetes and set on fire, were strewn on the road. In the Valley of Bourdon, not far from the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Haiti and the prime minister’s office, more charred bodies littered the roadway.
Lazarre said events began unfolding around 2 a.m. when police intercepted both the truck and a minibus headed up the hill into the neighborhood. Both vehicles were carrying members of armed groups, which after days of battling police and members of the multinational police mission in the Solino and Nazon neighborhoods of the capital had openly declared war and said Pétion-Ville and neighboring Delmas would be next.
In addition to the gang members who were in the truck, other armed gang members, he said, were killed after the minibus was stopped in the Post-Marchand neighborhood of the capital.
Hundreds of rounds of ammunition were seized from the gangs along with a drone and at least two AK47s automatic rifles, Lazarre said, adding that police were continuing to carry out operations in the Bourdon area of the capital “where a lot of these guys are hiding.”
The attempt by armed gangs to attack Pétion-Ville, home to luxury hotels and some of the country wealthiest people, came amid heightened tensions in Haiti. Last week, the nine-member Transitional Presidential Council that leads Haiti ousted the prime minister, Garry Conille, and installed a new head of government, entrepreneur Alix Didier Fils-Aime.
At his swearing in ceremony, Fils-Aime said restoring security and organizing elections are his top priorities. However, both are tall orders as armed gangs become more emboldened and more neighborhoods fall under their control despite the presence of the armed international police mission led by Kenya, with officers from the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize.
Last week, after three U.S. airlines jets were hit by gang gunfire while either landing or leaving Port-au-Prince, the airport authority shut down the international and domestic airports in the capital and the Federal Aviation Administration issued a 30-day ban on all U.S. flights to Haiti. The FAA’s decision has also affected U.N. humanitarian flights as well as a leased helicopter that Taiwan is funding for the Haiti National Police to transport cops to hot zones.
The attacks were accompanied by a surge in violence in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area that in the past week that has displaced an additional 20,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, the United Nations has said. They join the more than 700,000 Haitians who have already had to flee their homes.
“Children in Haiti are once again bearing the brunt of relentless violence by armed groups that has upended their lives, casting a dark cloud over their futures,” Geeta Narayan, country director for the U.N.’s leading child welfare agency, UNICEF, said on Monday. “Children are not only enduring the trauma of violence in neighborhoods like Solino and Tabarre but also facing the compounded impacts of malnutrition, cholera outbreaks, severe psychological distress, and all too often, tragic loss of life.”
On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council will discuss the situation in Haiti in a meeting called by Russia and China. The two countries, which have veto power in the council, remain opposed to a push by the U.S. to transform the multinational security mission into a formal U.N. peacekeeping operation. Such a move would guarantee funding for the under-resourced effort, and also expand the number of foreign cops and military on the ground in Haiti to help in the fight against the gangs.
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