At least 70 killed in Haiti gang attack

A massacre in a farming town comes as gangs expand to rural areas once deemed safe.

People displaced by gang violence wait for food at a refugee camp in Port-au-Prince last month. Picture: AFP

A criminal gang gunned down ­civilians and torched homes in a small farming town in Haiti, killing at least 70 people including women and babies.

The attack by the Gran Grif gang on the town of Pont Sonde was one of the worst massacres in recent years in a country shaken by political instability and violence. Gangs that already control most of the capital of Port-au-Prince have been expanding to rural areas once deemed relatively safe.

About 10 women and three infants were killed in the massacre, the UN’s human rights office said at the weekend. A doctor at the nearby Saint-Nicolas Hospital said the facility was overwhelmed with injured victims who had been slashed with machetes.

Acting Prime Minister Garry Conille called the attack, which began in the middle of the night on Thursday, an act of “unspeakable brutality … this new act of ­violence, targeting innocent civilians, is unacceptable and requires an urgent, rigorous, co-­ordinated response from the state”.

Mr Conille said the country’s beleaguered police force had sent officers from an anti-gang unit to track down gang members responsible for the killings in Pont Sonde, north of Port-au-Prince in a region known for its rice fields.

There is virtually no police presence outside of Port-au-Prince, including in Artibonite, the department where Pont Sonde is located and where police stations have been destroyed by gangs, security experts say.

Some people inside the capital used a dirt path to flee to safer regions in eastern Haiti, circumventing roads blocked by gangs.

The UN special envoy to Haiti, William O’Neill, said Gran Grif was one of the most brutal, violent gangs in all of Haiti. He said police posts in the area had regularly been attacked by the gang.

Haiti’s gangs, which control about 85 per cent of Port-au-Prince, have been accused of mass murder, rape, kidnapping and choking off ports and food distribution, sparking a humanitarian crisis that has displaced hundreds of thousands in the western hemisphere’s poorest country.

In June, Kenyan police officers were deployed to Haiti as part of a US and UN-backed mission to fight warlords and bring order, but Mr Conille last month said Haiti had received just 400 Kenyan troops of a roughly 2500-strong security force the international community had promised.

After visiting Haiti last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised the possibility of transforming the current mission into a UN peacekeeping mission to ensure funding.

The Wall Street Journal