The gang killings of 14 Haitian policemen in the space of two weeks unleashed a wave of violence on Jan. 26 in three of the country’s departments, reportedly launched by rebel gangs of current and former police officers plus disgruntled rank and file members. The violence, which paralyzed the capital of Port-au-Prince, came in response to the Jan. 20 attack on a group of officers in the Petionville district of Port-au-Prince, once thought to be relatively safe, which killed seven, and a second attack five days later at the Liancourt substation in the Artibonite Valley which killed six officers.
The Gan Grif gang behind the police murders issued a taunting video showing a laughing gang member standing over the bloodied, desecrated bodies of the six officers killed in Liancourt.
In the capital, the rebel policemen blocked roads, shot automatic weapons in the air, burned tires and assaulted the home of the hated, unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry and attacked Toussaint Louverture International Airport. Several foreign embassies temporarily closed on Jan. 27 due to the violence. The embassy of Bahamas, the only Caribbean embassy in Haiti, closed its doors for good.
Various members of the “international community” responsible for keeping the corrupt Ariel Henry in power, in a situation in which there is literally no government, no Parliament, and not a single elected official, made a show of expressing condolences over the police deaths while calling for “calm.”
