Drew Hinshaw, Ryan Dube, Kejal Vyas and Juan Forero
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—After he climbed the bloodstained staircase, Carl Henry Destin found a baffling scene.
The Haitian president lay dead on the floor, with multiple gunshot wounds. Every drawer was flung open, and papers were scattered as if someone had been searching for something.
“The bedroom had been totally ransacked…documents everywhere,” Mr. Destin said. “There were a lot of witnesses, but they didn’t want to talk.”
Mr. Destin, a judicial officer often tasked with logging evidence at a murder scene, counted dozens of bullet holes and their locations at the presidential residence. He was struck by the chaos of the scene and the thin recollections from the bystanders who described little more than hearing the clatter of gunfire.
Outside, police frantically halted traffic as they searched for Colombian mercenaries they said had been running through the narrow streets of the hillside neighborhood.
Nearly a month after Haiti’s 53-year-old head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, was killed on July 7, the circumstances remain just as murky, with no shortage of suspects and speculation—and more new questions than answers. Complicating matters: key investigators, including Mr. Destin, are in hiding, saying they are being threatened and fear for their lives.
Haitian police have implicated more than 40 people in a plot to kill the president of one of the world’s poorest countries, in a conspiracy they say ran from working-class towns in the high Colombian Andes to the Miami suburbs.
But no clear motive or mastermind has emerged in the investigation.
In a jail near the country’s airport are 18 former soldiers from Colombia suspected in the plot; another three are dead after police said gunbattles broke out in the hills of the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince.
The men deny killing the president, and say they were on a lawful drug-enforcement mission and were set up to take the blame. One Colombian suspect in custody told a visiting human-rights lawyer that the president was already dead when he arrived on the scene.
Police have also detained a barely known Florida-based Haitian-born preacher who they say attempted to install himself as Haiti’s interim ruler. Haitian politicians say they have never heard of the man.
Several senior police officers, including Mr. Moïse’s own security chief and members of his detail, have been arrested. No one has yet explained how the attackers so easily entered the residence and carried out the crime.
The following account is based on more than a dozen interviews with legal officials, political advisers, diplomats, judicial officers and lawyers briefed on the investigation, and several currently under arrest, including Jean Laguel Civil, the head of presidential security.
The Wall Street Journal reviewed WhatsApp messages among some of the suspects and audio recorded during a private planning meeting involving the Colombian ex-soldiers. Documents recording testimony given by key witnesses and photos taken during and after the chaotic melée that led to the death of the president were also reviewed.
The information, which includes details that haven’t previously been reported, adds to questions about the official outlines of the investigation.
“I really don’t trust any immediate leads of what we’ve heard so far,” said Georges Fauriol, a Haiti expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. “The story simply doesn’t add up.”
Haitian officials crucial to the investigation are now in hiding. Callers to Mr. Destin, the crime-scene officer, from blocked numbers have threatened his life and family, he said. Three other clerks and judicial officers on the case said they received the same calls. One colleague, tasked with interviewing suspects, left his lights on one Sunday night, then casually strolled away from his home with his wife, slipping into hiding with pages of handwritten notes from interviews with suspects, which haven’t yet been typed up.
For Haiti, the security failure could deepen chaos in a country where nearly half the population goes hungry, many young people are seeking to flee and violent gangs control swaths of territory and hold sway over elections. The killing has plunged the historically troubled country into its worst crisis since its 2010 earthquake.
Haitian police say publicly they are making progress.
“Whoever was involved in the murder, this person will be brought to justice,” Mr. Moïse’s successor, Prime Minister and acting President Ariel Henry, said in a recent interview. “No matter who he is.”
Police have divulged little evidence against the accused and haven’t provided a plausible motive, helping feed doubts about the official story of the Florida preacher’s central role in the assassination. Police have also detained or implicated a Haitian ex-senator, two DEA informants—one a convicted cocaine trafficker—several Miami businessmen and a former security contractor for the U.S. Embassy.
In his last year as president, Mr. Moïse’s country had reached a crisis point. Gangs carried out massacres in politically contested neighborhoods and conducted extortion schemes across the capital, where they now control about a third of the territory, according to the United Nations. Kidnappings have risen, and prominent lawyers, journalists and civil rights activists have been gunned down. Meanwhile, Haitians faced a 23% inflation rate in 2020.
Mr. Moïse had canceled several public contracts he and advisers felt were gouging the cash-strapped Haitian state, creating new enemies. His government said it foiled a coup attempt in February. He and other politicians were accused of involvement with gangs, which he had denied.
Pressure had grown from protesters, opposition lawmakers and international groups for Mr. Moïse to step down or make way for an election.
The Florida preacher
According to police, a plot against him was being formed in Port-au-Prince, Miami and Colombia, involving the little-known Haitian-American preacher in Florida, Christian Emmanuel Sanon.
For years, the 63-year-old pastor, who is being held by police in Port-au-Prince, pitched himself on YouTube and in conference rooms as a man with a plan to eradicate Haiti’s poverty. Efforts to reach Mr. Sanon or his brother for comment weren’t successful. It couldn’t be determined if he has a lawyer.
“We need a new leadership that will change the way of life,” he said in a 2011 YouTube video. By 2015, friends and colleagues said Mr. Sanon began talking about a transitional government for Haiti that would provide security and build prosperity.
He held more than 10 online meetings since 2020 with Parnell Duverger, a retired economics professor at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale. Together, they envisioned an $83 billion economic development plan for Haiti that Mr. Duverger developed, involving roads, hydroelectric power plants and waste removal infrastructure, according to a presentation of the plan, called “A Marshall Plan for Haiti,” reviewed by the Journal.
In May, Mr. Sanon showed it to a small group gathered at a Fort Lauderdale conference room, Mr. Duverger said in an interview. Present were Venezuelan émigré Antonio Intriago, the head of Miami-area security company CTU Security, and Ecuador-born Walter Veintemilla, president of Florida-based Worldwide Capital Lending Group, Mr. Duverger said.
Alleged funds for effort
Haitian authorities allege that CTU hired the Colombian ex-soldiers who are now in custody, while Mr. Veintemilla’s loan company provided the funds for the operation. The FBI has since raided properties owned by the two men in southern Florida, including Mr. Veintemilla’s home in Weston, as part of the investigation into the assassination. The men haven’t been arrested.
“Our client is innocent and is working to clear his name,” a lawyer for Mr. Intriago said. In a statement, Worldwide Capital, Mr. Veintemilla’s company, said Mr. Sanon approached the firm to provide financing for infrastructure projects and that it had assisted in providing a loan of unspecified size to CTU to fund those efforts. It said there was no discussion of an assassination plot or of using violence to bring about change in Haiti’s leadership.
Mr. Duverger said Mr. Sanon wanted to become prime minister one day, but there was no discussion at the meetings about forcing an unconstitutional overthrow of political leadership in Haiti. Mr. Duverger said he can’t fathom that Mr. Sanon was the mastermind of the assassination plot.
Haitian officials said that when they raided Mr. Sanon’s hotel room in Port-au-Prince, they found a cache of automatic weapons.
Those who knew the preacher said he was averse to guns, according to Steven Bross, a 65-year-old airline pilot who was Mr. Sanon’s neighbor in the 2000s in Brandon, Fla. “He’s a godly man and thinks everybody else should be too,” he said.
Mr. Sanon’s main source of income appeared to be an MRI machine he owned in Haiti, Mr. Bross said. In 2013, Mr. Sanon filed for bankruptcy in Florida, according to state records, and his home went into foreclosure.
“He could be considered quite naive, he has no street smarts,” Mr. Bross said. “I could see him being taken advantage of…. [Whoever is responsible] set him up big time.”
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