At least 70 dead in Haiti gang attack, U.N. says

The gang members, armed with automatic weapons, stormed into the small town of Pont-Sondé in central Haiti around 3 a.m. Thursday.

Then they started setting houses on fire.

“As people rushed out of their houses, they were shot,” said Ravina Shamdasani, chief spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Office.

When the violence ended, at least 70 people – including 10 women and three infants – were dead, while hundreds of others ran for their lives, the U.N. office said in a statement.

Among the victims were three newborn boys and 24 people found in a nearby ravine, Shamdasani added.

Entire families were wiped out and several people are still missing, according to an investigative report by the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights, a prominent civil rights organization in Haiti. The organization faulted authorities for a poor response time and not acting on widespread rumors about the attack, which had been known in the community for weeks.

Just days after its leader was sanctioned by the United States and the United Nations, the gang, called the Gran Grif, burned 45 houses and 34 vehicles in Pont-Sondé, which is roughly 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital, the U.N. said.

The death toll was expected to rise, because several people were severely injured, including two gang members wounded in a gunfight with police.

The attack appeared to target civilians in the area who were accused of colluding with a self-defense group known as “The Jean Denis Coalition.” The group formed in the face of minimal police presence and sought to protect the nearby, larger city of Saint-Marc from gang checkpoints, U.N. officials said.

Hundreds of now homeless survivors who fled their homes, including pregnant women, children and older people, gathered in Saint-Marc’s town square.

“Among the fleeing families are children who are terrified and exhausted,” said Gessika Thomas, a spokesperson for UNICEF, which was helping to respond to the mass killing.

Massacre underscores challenges

Even in a country known for extreme levels of violence, the massacre was considered the worst mass killing in several years, experts said, potentially overtaking a 2018 slaughter of 71 people in La Saline, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, which was then considered the worst in decades.

Gangs have sought to conduct criminal enterprises like extortion and kidnapping in Saint-Marc as they expand their territory and seek revenue sources in new areas.

The attack underscored the challenges faced by the international security force that has been deployed in Haiti since June, and whose mission is to take on the gangs that have sown violence and misery in the country.

The force, backed by the U.N., staffed largely by Kenya and financed mostly by the United States, is based in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

Three months into its deployment, the force has just over 400 of the planned 2,500 officers. It has no presence in Saint-Marc or the surrounding area, which is part of the Artibonite department, a key rice-growing region where at least 20 gangs are known to operate.

The Haitian National Police has seen thousands of its officers quit, get fired or leave the country in the past three years, leaving the agency severely understaffed.

A spokesperson for the Haitian National Police did not respond Friday to requests for comment.

The U.N. Human Rights Office, in its statement about Thursday’s massacre, called for increased funding for the Multinational Security Support mission, known as the MSS.

The leader of the Gran Grif gang knows that the multinational force lacks helicopters and the numbers necessary to take and hold areas, especially those distant from the capital, said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s Designated Expert on the Human Rights Situation in Haiti.

“This gang can operate with impunity until this fundamental weakness in the current deployment of the MSS is corrected,” he said. “And time is on the side of the gangs.”

The Multinational Security Support mission, a deployment of 410 officers from Kenya, Jamaica and Belize that arrived in late June, together with the Haitian National Police, deployed officers “by road and air” to “pacify and bring sanity to the area,” of the massacre, said Jack Ombaka, a spokesperson for the international force.

Prime Minister Garry Conille said the police anti-gang unit and the international force deployed specialized tactical units to the area and the government sent medical resources to a public hospital where many people were being treated.

“This new act of violence, targeting innocent civilians, is unacceptable and requires an urgent, rigorous and coordinated response from the state,” Conille said in a statement.

Gangs’ quest for control

The Artibonite lies between Port-au-Prince and the country’s main city in the north, Cap-Haïtien.

A key road runs through the region, making it lucrative for gangs who set up kidnapping ambushes on the road, taking people off buses en masse. Gangs in the Artibonite have also increasingly invaded farmland there.

Criminal groups are in a desperate and violent quest to control all of the country’s major highways, ports and the coastline. Three major roadways in and out of Port-au-Prince, including the one leading to the Artibonite, have been under gang control for months.

Drivers carrying agricultural produce and other supplies have been able to get through by paying extortion fees to the gangs, which has led to a rise in prices of consumer goods throughout the country. Farmers have been forced to abandon about 7,500 acres, further endangering Haiti’s food production at a time when experts estimate that at least half the country’s population is experiencing severe hunger.

“This attack comes amid an upsurge in violence in the region, exacerbating an already extremely precarious security situation,” Haiti’s Health Ministry said in a statement. “This violence disrupts the daily lives of residents, limiting their access to basic services, particularly health care. Persistent insecurity also prevents humanitarian interventions in certain localities, making the situation increasingly critical.”

Beyond those killed, at least 50 people were injured in Thursday’s attack, according to the Haitian Health Ministry.

While the ministry was attempting to use United Nations resources to respond by air, “direct intervention capacities are severely limited, due to the almost impossible access to the affected area,” the ministry said.

Engulfed in violence

Haiti has been in awash in extreme violence in the more than three years since the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.

Gang killings and kidnappings spiked earlier this year when several rival armed groups joined forces to attack police stations, prisons and hospitals. They succeeded in forcing the resignation of the prime minister, who was out of the country and unable to return after the airport closed for two months because of gang violence.

Some areas of Port-au-Prince have seen a return to normalcy, but more than 700,000 people who fled their homes after gang attacks on their communities are still unable to return. More than 100,000 people are living in squalid camps, while others have dispersed to homes of friends and family throughout the country.

The leader of the Gran Grif gang, Luckson Elan, and a local legislator who helped fuel his rise, were sanctioned last week by the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.N. Security Council.

When a person involved in gangs, the violation of human rights or widespread corruption is sanctioned by the Treasury Department, U.S. banks are prohibited from doing business with them, and they can no longer travel to the United States.

Elan was responsible for serious human rights abuses including kidnapping, murder, beating, rape, looting, destruction, extortion, hijacking, and stealing crops and livestock, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

“The situation is especially devastating for his child victims, who have been subjected to forced recruitment and sexual violence,” the statement said.

From January 2022 until October 2023, more than 1,690 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in the Artibonite, according to a report by Global Initiative, an organized crime research organization in Geneva.

At one point, the region represented more than a quarter of the victims of violence in Haiti, the report said.

More than 3,600 people have been killed so far this year throughout Haiti, according to the U.N., maintaining last year’s levels of violence.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.