Florida jury finds four guilty in Haiti president assassination plot

MIAMI, CMC- A Florida jury on Friday convicted four men on charges of plotting to kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 by hiring mercenaries to assassinate him at his Port-au-Prince home.

Moïse was shot 12 times, with a bullet to his heart delivering the fatal blow, according to Jean Armel Demorcy, Haiti’s only forensic pathologist, who testified on behalf of prosecutors. Moïse’s wife, Martine, was wounded during the attack and flown to the US for treatment.

Moïse was gunned down at his private residence on July 7, 2021, and during the nine-week trial, prosecutors argued that the men assembled two dozen former Colombian soldiers and supplied them with money, guns, ammunition and tactical vests in a conspiracy to kill Moïse.

Those convicted are 53-year-old Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, 62-year-old Antonio Intriago, 40-year-old James Solages, and 57-year-old Walter Veintemilla.

All four men face life in prison. At least five others have pleaded guilty in the conspiracy and are serving life sentences.

A fifth defendant, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haiti-born doctor who, according to court documents, would have been named president after Moïse was killed, is to be tried at a later date.

Ortiz and Intriago were principals of Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy and Counter Terrorist Unit Security, collectively known as CTU, and Veintemilla was a principal of Worldwide Capital Lending Group. Both companies were based in South Florida.

Solages was a CTU representative in Haiti who coordinated with Sanon and others, officials said.

The four defendants were found guilty on five counts, including conspiracy to provide material support, a terrorism-related charge, and conspiracy to lead a military expedition against a friendly nation, a violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act, which bans American citizens from waging war against any country at peace with the United States.

Intriago also faced four additional counts related to shipping bulletproof vests to Haiti for about 20 former Colombian soldiers whom CTU recruited and sent to Port-au-Prince roughly a month before the killing.

The murder prompted multiple investigations and indictments in Haiti and the United States, while investigators sought to determine who ordered the assassination and why.

The Miami Herald newspaper reported that defence lawyers for the Florida men said the government used unreliable evidence from Haiti, arguing that their clients only intended to serve an arrest warrant on the president because he had overstayed his term.

The defendants also claimed that by the time the Colombians arrived to arrest Moïse, he had already been killed by his own security forces and officials in his government.

“This is a Haitian plot and it is a Haitian conspiracy,” defence attorney Emmanuel Perez said, arguing that the men were being used as scapegoats in a flawed FBI investigation.

The verdict, delivered by a 12-member jury, came after 39 days of testimony, with the jury spending two days deliberating. Jurors had earlier sent a question to the judge about one of the nine charges related to the shipment of bulletproof vests to mercenaries in Haiti, a country under a U.S. arms embargo.

But prosecutors argued that the South Florida group, in collaboration with a few key Haitians starting in April 2021, wanted to replace Moïse with a new president willing to hire them for lucrative security and infrastructure contracts in Haiti.

“This case is very simple,” lead Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McLaughlin told jurors during closing arguments, adding, “this is a case about greed, arrogance and power”.

US District Judge Jacqueline Becerra will at a later date impose sentences in the case, where the jury heard the conspirators refer to Moïse as “a rat” and “a thief”, and refer to their weapons as “tools” and “screws”.

Prosecutors said the men also adopted the names of angels and led others to believe they were acting on behalf of the United States government, including the military and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The total budget for the coup, according to an FBI forensics expert, was about US$343,000 and was raised through a variety of sources, including about US$30,000 in federal pandemic relief loans.