WARNING: This story contains details that some readers may find upsetting.
Details of the massacre have not yet been revealed, but on Monday UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said the number of people killed over the weekend “in violence led by powerful gang leaders” was 184.
The murder took place in the capital’s Cité Soleil neighborhood.
According to reports, gang members rounded up dozens of residents over the age of 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area and shot or stabbed them to death with knives and machetes.
Residents said they saw mutilated bodies being burned in the streets.
RNDDH estimates 60 people were killed on Friday and 50 more were rounded up and killed on Saturday after the son of a gang leader died from illness.
RNDDH said all of the victims were over 60, but another human rights group said some younger people trying to protect older people were also killed.
Local media reported that elderly people believed to be practicing voodoo were singled out after a gang leader said his son’s illness was caused by them.
Human rights groups said the person who ordered the killing was Monell Felix, also known as Micano.
Mikano is known to be in control of Jeremy Pier, a strategic area of the capital’s port.
According to Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but difficult for security forces to infiltrate.
Local media said news of the fatal killing was spreading slowly as residents were prevented from leaving Jeremy Pier by Mikano’s gang.
The group forms part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance that controls much of the Haitian capital.
Haiti has been rocked by a wave of gang violence since the assassination of then-President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.
Data collected by GI-TOC, external It shows murder rates fell between May and September this year after rival gangs signed an uneasy ceasefire.
But the gang’s attempts to expand its territory beyond its stronghold in the capital have led to bloody incidents over the past two months, with ordinary residents increasingly targeted rather than rival gang members.
On October 3, 115 locals were killed in Pont-Sondé, a small town in the Artibonite department.
The massacre was reportedly carried out by the Gran Griff gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist the Gran Griff’s attempts to rob the local population.
If the death toll announced by the United Nations for this weekend’s killings in Cité Soleil is confirmed, it would be the deadliest of the year.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been forced to flee their homes as gangs control about 85% of Port-au-Prince and swaths of the countryside swell.
Nationwide, more than 700,000 people, half of them children, are internally displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Gang members often use sexual abuse, including gang rape, to instill fear in local residents.
In a report released two weeks ago, external“The rule of law in Haiti has broken down so much that members of criminal groups can rape women without fear of any consequences,” wrote Nathalye Cotrino, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Attempts by the Kenya-led multinational security assistance mission to quell the violence have so far failed.
International police arrived in Haiti in June to strengthen the country’s police force, but they are underfunded and lack the equipment needed to take out heavily armed gangs.
Meanwhile, the Provisional Presidential Committee (TPC), which was created to organize elections and rebuild democratic order, appears to be in chaos.
The TPC replaced the interim prime minister last month and appears to have made little progress organizing the election.
“They are reigning on the ashes,” GI-TOC’s Romain Le Cour Grandmaison wrote of the parliament in the report.
