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

At least 70 people, including 10 women and three infants, were killed and 16 were injured after gangs armed with automatic rifles launched attacks on a town in Haiti’s breadbasket, torching homes and vehicles and sending residents fleeing, the U.N. human rights office said Friday.

The massacre Thursday morning in Pont-Sondé, a town some 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince, is one of the worst in Haiti’s Artibonite department, an agricultural region that has increasingly been terrorized by gang violence that is metastasizing from the capital.

It underscores the limitations of a U.N.-backed, Kenyan-led international police mission to Haiti that is tasked with beating back the gangs and putting the country on the road to new elections, but has been hobbled by a lack of personnel and funding.

The Haitian government said Friday that it sent medical supplies and security reinforcements, including members of an anti-gang policing unit and the Kenyan-led mission, to the region.

“This heinous crime, perpetrated against defenseless women, men and children, is not only an attack on these victims, but on the entire Haitian nation,” Haitian Prime Minister Gary Conille said in a post on X.

Frantz Alexis, director of St. Nicolas Hospital in the Artibonite department, said the facility received 25 victims with gunshot wounds. Five were dead when they arrived, he added, and 15 remained in the hospital. One was shot twice in the back and will probably lose the use of their legs.

“The patients we admitted had gunshot wounds in almost every part of their bodies,” Alexis told The Washington Post. “They had been shot in the chest, abdomen, thigh, leg and other areas. … We often receive gunshot wounds in this area, but this is the first time we’ve had such a large number all at once. It’s unprecedented.”

The attack by members of the Gran Grif gang began after 3 a.m., Haitian officials said. The U.N. human rights office said the gang members reportedly set at least 45 homes and 34 vehicles ablaze. A Haitian rights group said the assailants invaded the town by canoe.

The U.S. Treasury Department last week imposed sanctions on Luckson Elan, the leader of the Gran Grif gang, and Prophane Victor, a former Haitian lawmaker. It alleges that Victor armed men in the region to fortify his control over the area and secure his election. The men, it claims, later formed the gang.

Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network said in a report Friday that rumors of a potential gang assault had circulated for at least two months in the community. It criticized intelligence and security services for being caught off guard, calling whatever funding is allocated to them “worthless.”

The attack came the same week that several events highlighted the crises facing Haiti.

The World Food Program reported worsening hunger, with nearly half of the Caribbean nation facing acute hunger. Anti-corruption investigators recommended criminal charges against three members of the country’s transitional presidential council, accusing them of bribery.

The council was created in March after emergency negotiations between U.S., Haitian and neighboring leaders following a wave of gang attacks on the international airport in Port-au-Prince, the main seaport and several prisons.

“The new state authorities put in place by the international community had promised to bring order and security to the country,” Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network said in its Friday report. “However, nothing has changed since their accession to power.”

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council on Monday voted unanimously to extend the mandate of the Kenyan-led mission for one year. The mission, which officials have said could ultimately grow to 2,500 officers, has deployed just 410 personnel since June.

It has drawn criticism from Haitians for having made little progress against the gangs. A voluntary U.N. trust fund for the mission has secured $85 million of the estimated $600 million per year that Kenya has said is required.

Ahead of the vote, the United States, which has poured $300 million into the mission but declined to put its own boots on the ground, sought to transform the force into a U.N. peacekeeping mission. Such a move would help guarantee funding, but China and Russia opposed it.

Senior U.S. administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief reporters, this week dismissed claims that the Kenyan-led mission has failed and said that they intend to continue working to transform it to a peacekeeping mission - a shift Haitian officials have said they’d support despite a long legacy of interventions from abroad that have failed to bring long-lasting stability to Haiti.

Venson François, a prosecutor in the city of Saint-Marc in the Artibonite department, said a contingent of Haitian police with 11 armored vehicles have since arrived. The area, he added, has suffered from a shortage of police officers and weapons, leaving the gangs “to do as they please.”

At the Charles Colimon Hospital, Bob Edem Gaston was still assessing the damage from Thursday’s attack. He said the health-care facility had received four gunshot victims, all of them heavily armed gang members who have since been released.

“As a human being,” Gaston told The Post, “this affects me deeply.”