Haiti’s chief prosecutor on Tuesday ordered Prime Minister Ariel Henry not to leave the country until he answers questions about the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse two months after the gruesome crime still under investigation.
The new crisis focuses on two suspicious phone calls made on the morning of July 7, the night of the assassination of President Henry Prime Minister and one of the main suspects in the assassination, Joseph Felix Badio, a former official of the Ministry of Justice still fugitive.
On Friday, Henry was invited by the capital’s chief prosecutor, Port-au-Prince, to answer questions about the phone calls, which lasted a total of seven minutes, and which according to police were initiated by Badio from of the vicinity of the crime scene. The calls came at 4:03 a.m. and 4:20 p.m., just three hours after the murder, according to phone company records via GPS, or global positioning technology.
Many Haitians are curious to know what the prime minister was doing on the phone with one of the alleged perpetrators of the crime so soon after the president was shot dead in his bedroom, apparently by a team of former Colombian soldiers who had been hired to do security work in Haiti by a Miami company.
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Henry did not refer directly to the phone calls and previously told a local radio station that he knew Badio and defended him, adding that he did not believe Badio was involved because he did not have the means.
He also assured that the perpetrators of the crime will be brought to justice. “The real culprits, the intellectual perpetrators and co-perpetrators and sponsors of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse will be found and brought to justice and punished for their crimes,” he said on Saturday.
A respected neurosurgeon
Henry was nominated by Jovenel Moïse for the post of prime minister two days before his assassination as part of an effort to reduce political tensions. This respected neurosurgeon and moderate politician seems to have little reason to be involved in the assassination plan. However, since he took office he has angered some of Moses ’allies, who now seem to line up against him.
At a cabinet meeting on Monday, a challenger Henry fired the country’s chief prosecutor, Bed-ford Claude. But ministers appear to have resisted signing the order, local media reported.
But the next day, the prosecutor counterattacked and asked a judge to charge the prime minister in the assassination of the president and asked the authorities to ban him from leaving the country because of the incriminating evidence against him.
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“Compromising elements”
“There are enough compromising elements (…) to prosecute Henry and demand his pure and simple indictment,” Claude wrote in the order.
In the letter released on Tuesday, the prosecutor cited several articles of the penal code to “justify the application of public action against Mr. Ariel Henry,” because of “these very serious facts of conspiracy against the internal security of the state.”
However, legal experts claim that the prosecutor has no authority over criminal investigations as long as they remain directed by the judicial authorities – known as the ‘investigating judge’ or trial judge – assigned to the case.
“What is happening in Haiti is very sad. None of this is legal,” said Jean Sénat Fleury, a veteran Haitian investigating judge who emigrated to the United States in 2007. “This is not justice, it is politics. I spent 20 years as a judge in Haiti and I don’t understand what’s going on there, ”he added.
The prosecutor’s dismissal was made official on Tuesday. In a brief letter, Henry informed Claude that he had been fired for an undefined “serious administrative misconduct.” It was not immediately clear how Claude’s dismissal would affect the case and whether Henry would have to continue counting the phone calls.
More than 40 suspects have been arrested in the case, including 18 former Colombian military personnel.
Badio is a former anti-corruption official in the Ministry of Justice who was fired in March for an alleged lack of ethics on his part. He has not been seen, nor has he made any public statement, since that night.
Other evidence in the case, such as leaked testimonies from some of the former Colombian soldiers, implicate Badio in the order of the assassination, although it remains unclear what his motive was or whether there were other intelligent perpetrators. lectuals behind.
