The United Nations human rights chief said on Monday that 184 people were killed over the weekend in the Haitian capital as Port-au-Prince was rocked by a surge in gang violence that escalated the death toll of Haiti’s spiraling security crisis at least 5,000.
“Last weekend, at least 184 people were killed in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, in the Cite Soleil area,” Volker Turk told reporters in Geneva. “These latest killings bring the death toll in Haiti this year alone to a staggering 5,000.”
Volker appeared to be referring to a massacre reported by a gang leader in the impoverished Cite Soleil neighborhood who targeted elderly people he suspected of making his own son sick with witchcraft.
Reuters news agency on Sunday quoted the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH) as saying that Monel “Mikano” Felix, leader of the Wharf Jeremie gang, had ordered the killings in Cite Soleil and that all the victims of the attack was over. 60 years
RNDDH said Felix had sought advice from a voodoo priest who told him that the elderly in the area had harmed his son, who died on Saturday, prompting his gang members to kill at least 100 people Friday and Saturday with machetes and knives.
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Cite Soleil is a densely populated neighborhood near the port of Port-au-Prince. It is among the most impoverished and violent areas of the small country.
Haiti has been in political chaos for years, leaving room for heavily armed criminal gangs to seize large swaths of territory in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere. Much of the capital remains lawless despite hundreds of Kenyan police being sent in to help reassert law and order.
International airlines have done this to a large extent stopped flying in and out of Haiti amid chaos and bloodshed, with several US carriers grounding flights entirely after planes were hit by gunfire in November. American Airlines said over the weekend that it no longer planned to resume flights starting in February, as previously reported, joining Spirit Airlines and JetBlue Airways in postponing all routes through Haiti indefinitely.