Haiti gang kills 110 people accused of witchcraft
A Haiti gang have been brutally murdered by gang members in the Haitian capital, Port-au- Prince, according to a human rights group.
According to the National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH), 110 mostly elderly people have been killed and said a local gang leader had targeted them after his son fell ill and subsequently died.
The gang leader reportedly consulted a voodoo priest who blamed elderly locals practising “witchcraft” for the boy’s mystery illness.
The United Nations said the number of people killed in Haiti so far this year in gang violence had reached “a staggering 5,000”.
While details from the massacre are still emerging, the UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday put the number of people killed over the weekend “in violence caused by the leader of a powerful gang” at 184. The killings happened in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of the capital.
According to reports, gang members seized scores of residents aged over 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area, rounded them up and then shot or stabbed them to death with knives and machetes.
Residents reported seeing mutilated bodies being burned in the streets.
RNDDH estimated 60 were killed on Friday while another 50 were rounded up and murdered on Saturday, after the gang leader’s son had died of his illness.
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, 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. -BBC
