The Mayor of the town of Carrefour, a suburban city in the Port-au-Prince Arrondissement, in the Western Department of Haiti, Monday called on the police to conduct an impartial investigation into last weekend’s shooting at a cultural event that resulted in the deaths of three young people.
“The municipal administration expresses its condolences to the parents and loved ones of the victims and calls on the police and judicial authorities to shed full light on this odious crime and to bring its perpetrators to justice,” Mayor Jude Edouard Pierre, said in a statement
Reports said that men on motorcycles Friday night fired indiscriminately on patrons at the cultural activity resulting in the deaths of 25 year old Samorat Jonville, 25 year old Luc Berlot Boursiquor and Luc Soinel Jules, whose age was not given.
The mayor said he is calling on the “High Command of the National Police on the need to conduct independent investigations into these cases of repeated unpunished murders for several years in the commune and to prevent others that could occur”.
He said in a bid to allow the authorities to restore peace and to allow the police to coordinate their patrols, ”all cultural activities on public roads are strictly prohibited throughout the town until at further notice”.
Meanwhile, the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights (CARDH) in its latest report published last Saturday, said that while 204 “alleged” bandits were lynched by members of the citizen self-defense movement “Bwa Kale”, some of the killings are questionable.
The CARDH said that the killings occurred between April 24 and June 24, this year and that since the establishment of the popular justice movement, eight of the 10 departments have been affected.
It said that the Department of the West leads with 158 lynchings followed by the Artibonite Department with 24 and Grand’Anse with 12.
In the report, the CARDH states that in some cases the “Bwa Kale” movement was used as a pretext for the purpose of revenge.
“Allied with the police and other unidentified individuals, people would have used this movement….to settle accounts with third parties in relation to previous conflicts of various kinds, unrelated to gangs,” the report noted.
It said that people other than bandits would have been lynched because of “their parental ties with alleged gang members,” noting that “In some cases, the police seem to be accomplices or passive”.
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti, Jun 26, CMC