Satellite image of a Haitian police officer brutally gunning down a civilian. Photo: Uncaptured Media.
By Dan Cohen and Kim Ives – Nov 9, 2024
The video provides a stunning and emblematic example of on-going police massacres of civilians as the U.S. government pushes for a UN intervention.
On the morning of Sat., Nov. 9, 2024, officers of the Haitian National Police (PNH) in an armored car, without provocation, shot, robbed, and then ran over the body of a man who had willingly stopped to talk to them near the intersection of Rue des Casernes and Avenue Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Grande Rue) in downtown Port-au-Prince.
In the shocking video, the victim first approaches the black, armored car – emblazoned with the identifier COB-9 – in a manner that suggests he bore no enmity for or fear of the officers inside. After relaxedly communicating with them as he stood about four feet from the vehicle’s half-opened door, the man was suddenly shot in the stomach by an officer inside the vehicle. As the victim fell backwards onto the road, a hooded police officer emerged from the armored car with his rifle. The wounded man attempted to flee, but the cop shot him to death, splattering the victim’s blood all over the road’s pavement.
The armored car then began to drive away, but then the shooter again got out of the vehicle, walked over to the prone corpse, and removed an item from the victim’s pants’ pocket. As the police vehicle backs up, the masked cop casually tosses the stolen item into the armored car, climbs back in, and the vehicle drives away. The armored car soon returns and purposefully drives over the legs of the victim’s corpse.
This ghastly scene was filmed by a drone operated by the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition of armed groups which is battling the combined forces of the PNH and the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, a UN-sanctioned mercenary force of about 430 mostly Kenyan cops paid for primarily by Washington.
The killing is emblematic of massacres occurring on a vast scale in recent months throughout metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, as police officers – usually from armored cars – kill Haitian civilians, men and women, young and old, without reason, warning, provocation, or cause, according to dozens of witnesses and news reports.
A PNH officer explained to France24 in May that they operate under the assumption that there are no civilians in impoverished neighborhoods.
“We don’t need to know if they’re armed or not. We just fire,” he remarked.
In the spring and early summer, in an area called Maïs Gâté near the Health Ministry (MSPP) and the Port-au-Prince International Airport, the PNH began duping the bodies of dozens of unidentified victims, mostly young men – two, three, and four at a time – according to numerous reports which Haïti Liberté received. Witnesses and Haïti Liberté reporters were too frightened to take photographs or video of the dumping ground, out of fear they would end up in it, but word of the killing field soon spread and the dumping there was stopped.
This spring, the Viv Ansanm released another drone video of a young man emerging from a police vehicle in which he was apparently being held. As he unhurriedly walked away from the car, the officers shot him in the back from the vehicle, killing him.
On Jun. 29, in a long on-line recording, Jeff “Gwo Lwa” Larose of the Viv Ansanm affiliate in Canaan, condemned the PNH for indiscriminately gunning down residents of his neighborhood and other communities. The victims included market women and innocent pedestrians walking along the roads, he said. He claimed the cops were wantonly sowing terror in many poor neighborhoods.
In a declaration the same day, Haitian journalist Ralph Laurent of “Tele Live Tanbou Verite A” said:
“Before the Kenyan mercenaries arrived in the land of Jean-Jacques Dessalines this month, a bunch of foreign and local mercenaries spent more than three months murdering young women and young men in our various neighborhoods, accusing them of being ‘gang members.’ Remember, if your National ID card is marked Delmas 2, Delmas 4, Delmas 6 until at least Delmas 24, UTAG-10 [the PNH’s Anti-Gang Unit] and other mercenaries condemn you to death. After they kill you, they stuff you inside a their tank. If you are a woman, they rape you before they shoot you, and they do this even if you are a man because they have gays among them too. After that, they smash your head and burn your body. When UTAG-10 eats us like this, the police already have several media lined up to say that we are criminals … and also to make us believe that Viv Ansanm murdered us.
For example: A UTAG-10 armored car and other invisible mercenaries shot at a public transportation bus last month in the Fontamara area. At least six passengers died on the spot. Although there were among the victims some who filmed the scene on the spot and confirmed that it was a [PNH] armored car that carried out the massacre, just like Delmas 60, 95 and 103, Radio Tele Métronome, which I always respect, declared that it was the Viv Ansanm thugs who fired on the bus and killed the passengers…
Popular neighborhood people, my message to you, … is that the criminal mercenaries of Kenya and [the PNH] UTAG-10… will massacre outside of your neighborhoods… Don’t let the Kenyan mercenaries and PNH criminals who are armed tools of the embassies in [Haiti] destroy our bodies… Let the world see that the plan was indeed a genocide in our neighborhoods…”
On Sep. 30, 2024, a UN panel of experts presented their report to the UN Security Council in which they stated that in only three months, from Jan. 1 to Mar. 31, 2024, “590 civilians unrelated to gangs were killed or injured during police operations against gangs. There have been also reports of extrajudicial executions by police officers in the areas of Cité Soleil, Drouillard, and Vincent in the commune of Port-au-Prince.”
Meanwhile, the PNH Inspector General has “opened 23 investigations of alleged human rights violations committed by the police, [but] so far none of those cases have been concluded.”
As Jake Johnston, a researcher specializing on Haiti at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) noted in an Oct. 31 tweet: “Lost amid the focus on combating Haiti’s armed groups has been the increase in extrajudicial killings by police.”
The PNH is trained and funded by the U.S., which has sent numerous tactical and armored vehicles, including the one the killer cop rode inside. Just five days before the killing took place, the U.S. delivered its most recent shipment of armored personnel carriers, which was sent to support the MSS troops.
Today’s latest video dramatically shows the terrible and arbitrary carnage being unleashed through “extrajudicial killings” and cold-blooded murder against Haitian civilians by the very “forces of order” which claim to be protecting their lives and security.
(Substack)
Dan Cohen
Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary, Killing Gaza. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine, Latin America, the US-Mexico border and Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCohen3000.
Kim Ives
Journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio and television commentator.
