PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – A Haitian judge in charge of the investigation into the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 has indicted around fifty people including the latter’s widow, Martine Moïse, and a former Prime minister, shows a document made public by the AyiboPost information site.
According to this 122-page document, written by Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire, Martine Moïse conspired with former Prime Minister Claude Joseph to assassinate Jovenel Moïse with the aim of replacing him herself as president of the country.
Jovenel Moïse was shot dead in the middle of the night in his bedroom after armed men entered his home in Port-au-Prince. Martine Moïse was injured in the incident.
In his decision, the judge calls for the people he is indicted to be arrested and brought to justice.
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No comment was immediately obtained by Reuters from Martine Moïse and Claude Joseph.
Martine Moïse denounced political persecution and arrests described as unjust via social networks.
Claude Joseph told the Miami Herald that Jovenel Moïse’s de facto successor, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, was the main beneficiary of the leader’s death and that Henry was now using the Haitian justice system as a “weapon” to persecute his opponents in a “classic coup d’état” approach.
Ariel Henry’s services underlined in a press release the independence of the judge, who has the “freedom” to make decisions in “compliance with the law and with his conscience”, they said.
Appointed to replace Claude Joseph, who is now the leader of an opposition party, Ariel Henry promised to organize elections before postponing them indefinitely, citing a devastating earthquake and the increased influence of heavily armed criminal groups, which reportedly control most of Port-au-Prince.
A separate legal proceeding over the assassination of Jovenel Moïse was opened in Miami, where six of the 11 defendants pleaded guilty to plotting to send Colombian mercenaries to the president’s home with the aim of kidnapping him, before the plan changed at the last minute, with instructions to assassinate Jovenel Moïse.
(Reporting Harold Isaac and Sarah Morland; French version Jean Terzian)
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