PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – How could only a handful of heavily armed, black-hooded gunmen storm the national penitentiary in broad daylight, freeing about 480 prisoners?
Were they supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Were they gang members? Former soldiers? Or the police themselves?
Two days after the daring assault on the prison, there are more questions than answers.
Two key allies of Aristide were among the escapees. Both former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert were back at the penitentiary five hours after it was raided Saturday, with government officials and representatives of the United Nations peacekeeping mission giving contradictory accounts of how they were returned.
Police spokeswoman Gessy Coicou said Neptune and Privert were captured by police after escaping. But UN spokesman Damian Onses-Cardona said that in the chaos of the gunmen’s assault the two had sought refuge in the house of another escapee. They contacted the UN and asked to be returned, he said, because they’d had no intention of fleeing or living as fugitives. Bill Quigley, an American lawyer who visited Neptune and Privert yesterday, confirmed this account.
In the local media, the prison break was portrayed as an attempt to free Neptune and Privert. UN Civilian Police Commissioner David Beer said, however, the heavily armed men who attacked the penitentiary were likely chimeres, or armed gangs, seeking to free fellow gang members. And one top official in the police force who asked not to be named said he suspected former soldiers were responsible.
It remains unclear how such a massive prison break could have taken place in downtown Port-au-Prince just three blocks from the national palace and police headquarters, where 125 UN riot police and dozens of Haitian police officers stand guard.
Nor is it apparent how the handful of assailants (witnesses in front of the penitentiary said they saw only one vehicle and several gunmen) managed to get past dozens of guards and free more than a third of the inmates before the police and UN troops arrived. Most escapees remained at large last night.
According to Marie-Yolene Gilles, an observer for the National Coalition for Haitian Rights who was at the prison Sunday, only six hooded gunmen dressed in black entered the prison. One off-duty prison guard was shot and killed outside, but no guards inside were harmed, Gilles said.
Claude Theodat, chief of Haiti’s prison system, declined to be interviewed, and a government spokesman said yesterday that he had been fired, according to The Associated Press. The government has promised to form a commission to investigate the prison break.
In the poor, strongly pro-Aristide neighborhood of Bel Air, one man who claimed to have escaped said he saw two hooded gunmen in black, “POLICE” on the backs of their shirts, and carrying automatic weapons telling prisoners they were free to leave. Such a uniform is commonly used by Haitian police.
Reynold Georges, a politician and lawyer who represents more than 20 prisoners, said several of his clients who had escaped told him the attackers appeared to be police officers.
Reached on his cell phone Sunday, prison warden Sony Marcellus said he was being held in an isolation cell in the Port-au-Prince police station, although he did not say why. The prison break comes at a time when police are being investigated by the UN for a spate of executions and being criticized in the media for failing to capture Remissainthe Ravix, an anti-Aristide leader accused of killing four police officers.
Members of Aristide’s Lavalas party accused the government Sunday of staging the attack to divert attention from the manhunt for Ravix and to justify a crackdown on Aristide’s supporters.
“It’s a simulation,” said Samba Boukman, spokesman for the Popular Base Resistance Movement, a coalition of anti-government groups. “They say it was Lavalas activists, but it was the government who did it.”
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