What exactly happened during the Wednesday attack is still unknown , along with its motive. But Carl Henri Destin, a local district judge tasked with investigating …
What exactly happened during the Wednesday attack is still unknown, along with its motive. But Carl Henri Destin, a local district judge tasked with investigating and documenting the crime scene, described the aftermath in minute detail to CNN. « The doors were riddled with bullets, the glass was broken, the doors were smashed, even the locks were destroyed and lying on the ground, » he said. Inside, up a wide bloodstained stairway leading to a bedroom, Destin says he peered through another smashed doorway, and saw his President lying on the ground. « He was wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue jeans. His shirt was ripped and full of blood. I saw 12 visible bullet wounds in the president’s body…they smashed his left eye, but both were still open. » Dozens of viral images and videos purporting to show the shocking attack are circulating in Haiti and abroad, of which few can be verified as authentic. But hardly any show Moise, the damage left by the attack, or the removal of his body from the house; Destin takes credit for that, explaining that he forbade most other people at the crime scene from snapping photos out of respect for the fallen leader. Yet in perhaps a sign of the intense local hunger for an explanation, even the absence of images is spawning conspiracy theories. And in Port-au-Prince, it’s all adding momentum to a wave of speculation and uncertainty in a city already rattled by rampant criminal violence, economic deprivation and political instability. What we know and don’t know Many questions remain unanswered about what exactly transpired in the Haitian president’s house on the night of his death. What we do know is that according to the remaining government — now led by acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph — Moise’s home was attacked around 1 a.m. He was killed, and his wife, First Lady Martine Moise, was wounded. She has since been flown to Miami for treatment. A group of at least 28 people are suspected in the killing, of which 26 are Colombian and two are US citizens. So far,20 of those suspects have been detained, five are on the loose and three have been killed. According to a spokesman for the acting Prime Minister’s office, those burned-out cars down the street from Moise’s house belonged to some of the suspects, whom police later confronted in a shootout.
