“Something terrible happened”: a radio call with one of the men accused of the assassination plan in Haiti

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) – As Haitians woke up last week to the news that their president had been brutally assassinated, an unidentified man called a local radio station and delivered a strange live monologue.

He was the translator for a group tasked with providing security for the President of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, he said, but during a meeting at his private residence, “something terrible happened.”

“There is loss of life, but we did not do it,” he said.

Moïse’s assassination has sparked an extensive investigation in several countries, with the support of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Colombian intelligence services. No public statements have been made from at least two dozen people who have been arrested in connection with the case. However, new audio and video recordings The day of the murder obtained by CNN may offer a glimpse into the mindset of those now implicated in the murder.

A reporter witnessed the call on Route de Kenscoff street

While the unidentified person was speaking on Radio Mega, a local reporter overheard him.

A reporter and his cameraman from Radio Televisión Caraibes, one of Haiti’s largest radio stations, were riding their motorbike up the rugged Route de Kenscoff toward the president’s private residence on a mission to see what they could find out about the murder.

The footage they recorded shows a seemingly unguarded checkpoint of two trucks that they got around with ease – the start of an extraordinary five minutes in the company of what would soon be the Haiti’s Most Wanted Men.

Just up the hill, two men in ski masks came out of a ditch holding long guns and yelled. Malhaiko Senechal, the reporter, was unfazed. “I’m used to seeing armed men at my job, when I drive around town,” he said. “I thought they were helping the police responding to the murder.”

After 15 years researching the news in Port-au-Prince, Senechal’s instinct was to stop and find out more. He saw more men standing in the shade of bushes and flowers sticking out of a nearby wall. They seemed vigilant and a bit restless, but not obviously hostile or upset, he told CNN. Three were wearing weapons and apparently protective vests, and a fourth was seated, speaking rapidly on his mobile phone in Haitian Creole.

According to Senechal, the interlocutor described himself as a translator and insisted over the phone that he and his group had tried to serve an arrest warrant for the president.

Meanwhile, Radio Mega listeners were listening to the following live from the unidentified caller:

“This group is from the president’s own hand; it is a group that he allowed to enter the country to provide security. It turns out that the same group has received an arrest warrant against him.”

“Something terrible happened, although we did not expect it to happen. However, I was only translating for them. When we tried to enter the door to deliver the order, the president’s entourage opened fire. Consequently, these agents responded to the shots to protect their lives”.

Standing a few meters away, Senechal called his boss, who confirmed his own growing suspicion: he was probably in the middle of those involved in the attack on the president’s house.

“When I heard the interpreter who was doing the interview with Radio Mega, I immediately knew that I was in danger, in danger because they were men who came to assassinate the president. If they can assassinate my president and I am a simple citizen, because I feared for myself life, “Senechal said.

An arrest plan

For someone to claim that they were hired to protect the president and ordered to arrest him seems counterintuitive at best. However, it closely resembles the explanations already the authorities have given of Haiti and Colombia in the week since the assassination of the president.

At least 39 people have been implicated in the assassination of President Moïse, and 26 of the suspects are Colombians, many of them ex-military. Citing Haitian authorities, Colombian police said Thursday that some of the Colombians were recruited and brought to Haiti on the understanding that their job was to detain the leader and hand him over to US law enforcement.

The initial plan was “to detain the president and make him available to the (US Drug Enforcement Agency),” Colombian police chief General Jorge Vargas said Thursday at a press conference in Bogotá. Haitian police have also said that the suspects were allegedly carrying a document purporting to be an arrest warrant. CNN has no proof of the authenticity of the document.

Several of the suspects had ties to the United States: some had been informants for the DEA and the FBI, while others had participated in US military training and education programs while serving in the Colombian military. However, there is no indication of the DEA’s direct involvement in the operation that killed President Moïse, according to Vargas, and the agency has said that none of the attackers were operating on his behalf.

Some of the alleged killers were likely misled by their compatriots, Colombian President Iván Duque told a local radio station on Thursday. Preliminary investigation suggests that the Colombians were working in two groups, he said: a smaller group that knew of a “criminal” target and was aware that the larger operation was a cover-up, and a larger group that had been kept in the dark.

“An important group was brought there to work in a supposed private security, protection mission. But there was a smaller group that apparently had detailed knowledge that the result of the mission was going to be criminal,” Duque said, without offering more. tests.

It is not clear whether that result was going to be a presidential assassination, he added.

Two former Colombian military personnel, D Gobiernoy Capador and Germán Rivera, have been accused of directing the operation. The two previously met with Christian Emmanuel Sanon, the Florida-based pastor who, according to Haitian authorities, coordinated the military operation in hopes of seizing power from the country, according to Vargas, the Colombian police chief. Sanon denied all knowledge of the operation and has insisted on his innocence, according to a source close to the investigation who cannot be named because he is not authorized to speak about the matter.

For his part, Matías Gutiérrez, a Colombian security guard for an oil company in Bogotá, also said Capador tried to recruit him to travel to Haiti in early May, describing a job “like private security in Haiti.” Security for the President of Haiti, who believed threatened with death“.

Three other known suspects are Haitian-Americans, of whom two are believed to have been hired as translators for the group. Based on photos released after his arrest, Senechal believes that the man he spoke to, and who called Radio Mega, was one of them.

Haitian National Police Chief Leon Charles has declined to comment on whether any of the suspects have been charged or have legal representation, citing the ongoing investigation.

Capador and at least two other Colombians were killed by Haitian authorities in response to the murder.

The search raises more questions

Arrests continue in Haiti amid the search for a local mastermind – or several – capable of bringing in, arming and displacing dozens of foreign mercenaries. Several police officers and heads of security units have been subjected to “precautionary measures”, which are often aimed at limiting movements, according to the Haitian police. Four have been placed in isolation, including the head of national palace security, Dimitri Herard.

“I also believe that this has been a much bigger plot and that the authorities will have to clarify many aspects. Who has pushed to change the result of the operation? Why did everyone involved end up in the same place and not in two? Who was in charge of protecting the president? All these are things that we have to respond to and we are working with the Haitian authorities to find the instigators of this assassination, “Duque, the president of Colombia, said Thursday.

But much of the investigation remains opaque, leaving a lot of fertile ground for conspiracy theories, speculation, and hearsay. Several key pieces of information remain undisclosed, including CCTV footage from inside the president’s residence, and the account of Haiti’s most prominent potential witness, First Lady Martine Moïse, who was injured during the attack. from last week. Her official Twitter account has issued multiple statements in which she reflects on the death of her husband and thanks the medical staff in Miami, where she is hospitalized, but has not commented on what happened.

Without testimony from the suspects themselves, it has not yet been explained why Senechal and his cameraman were apparently allowed to get so close and also to leave, asking only if the couple had seen army or police troops at the foot of the hill. According to Senechal, the two journalists had not seen any security forces when climbing the hill, although upon leaving, about five minutes later, he was able to observe a score of armed security agents coming from the nearby Saint Pierre square.

Which raises one more question: why the Haitian authorities could have left a key roadblock unguarded in the face of the suspected killers, even briefly. A Haitian police spokeswoman did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

–Stefano Pozzebon contributed to this report from Bogotá, and Evan Perez and Barbara Starr from Washington.