Iran Press/ America: Gangs led by Jimmy Cherizier, a former police officer known as Barbecue, attacked the jail in the country’s capital overnight on Saturday.
Pierre Esperance of the National Network for Defense of Human Rights said only about 100 of the National Penitentiary’s estimated 3,800 inmates remained inside after the assault.
“We counted many prisoners’ bodies,” he added.
A reporter from the AFP news agency who visited the prison on Sunday said they saw about a dozen bodies outside it. The gate was open and there was “hardly anyone” left inside, they added.
The Reuters news agency reported that there were no signs of police officers at the prison and its main door was open.
“I’m the only one left in my cell,” one unidentified inmate told Reuters. “We were asleep when we heard the sound of bullets. The cell barriers are broken.”
In a statement, the Haitian government said police tried to repel the gang attack against that prison and at another facility called Croix des Bouquets. Esperance said it was not immediately clear how many inmates escaped from the second prison, which he said held 1,450 inmates.
Violence in Haiti has spiraled in recent days after calls by Cherizier for criminal groups to unite and overthrow Henry. Cherizier heads an alliance of gangs and faces sanctions from the United Nations and the United States.
Nearly 15,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in recent days, with 10 sites hosting internally displaced people emptied over the weekend, according to the United Nations’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Henry, who became prime minister in 2021 after Moise’s assassination, was supposed to step down by early February, but told a regional summit in Guyana before traveling to Kenya that he would only hold elections by August 2025 once the situation was more stable.
The last elections took place in 2016.
Read more:
UN calls for an end to violence in Haiti
