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