U.S. federal agents visited Haiti this week where they questioned several Colombian suspects in the ongoing investigation into the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.
The four suspects are among dozens of Colombian mercenaries accused of storming Moïse’s private residence in the hills of Port-au-Prince and shooting him to death. They were removed from their cells at Haiti’s National Penitentiary and met with FBI agents, according to several sources.
The day after questioning the suspects, agents visited Moïse’s private residence in the Pelerin 5 neighborhood accompanied by Haiti Investigative Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire, who is conducting his own separate inquiry into the killing.
According to several sources familiar with the inquiry, agents did not meet with Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, whose administration recently allowed the United States to transfer four of the jailed suspects to Miami to stand trial.
The deadly plot to kidnap and kill Haiti’s president was allegedly coordinated among various suspects in South Florida, Haiti and Colombia, including 11 suspects who have been charged by indictment in Miami.
In late January, Haitian American suspects Christian Emmanuel Sanon, James Solages and Joseph Vincent, along with Colombian national Germán Rivera Garcia, were transferred to Miami to to face federal conspiracy charges in connection with the slaying. Three of the four suspects are accused of helping coordinate a failed kidnapping of Moïse to remove him from office upon his return from a state visit to Turkey in June of 2021. The same three are also accused of conspiring in a final, successful plan to kill him at his home in the hillside suburbs of Port-au-Prince the following month.
While Solages, Vincent and Rivera are looking at life in prison for their alleged roles in the kidnapping attempt and assassination plot, Sanon faces up to 20 years on related smuggling charges. Despite assertions by Haitian investigators that he was the intellectual author of the plot, Sanon is being charged with export violations in a separate criminal complaint.
Two weeks later, U.S. authorities arrested four other individuals in the slaying. They included the owner of the Miami-area security firm CTU, which allegedly hired the ex-Colombians soldiers, and Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, who ran a sister company, CTU Federal Academy, which allegedly recruited the Colombian suspects via a WhatsApp group.
Ortiz, the Miami Herald previously reported, was an active FBI informant and, according to the U.S. authorities, once met with FBI agents and promoted “regime change” in Haiti head of the killing. There is no indication that the FBI was aware of Ortiz’s alleged involvement in the plot to kill Moïse.
Last week, one of 11 suspects currently awaiting trial in Miami in the shooting of the president, Rodolphe Jaar, pleaded guilty to providing money to pay for weapons, food and lodging for the ex-Colombian soldiers and others suspected in the fatal attack. A convicted Haitian drug trafficker, Jaar was the first to plead guilty in the murder conspiracy. By pleading guilty, he is hoping to avoid a potential life sentence for providing “material support” in the conspiracy to kidnap and kill Moïse on July 7, 2021.
