Colombian president says commandos knew they were on mission to murder Haiti’s Moïse

A small group of Colombian commandos-for-hire knew of the plot to assassinate the president of Haiti, Colombian President Iván Duque said Thursday, while his top police official identified two of the alleged leaders.

Eighteen Colombians are among 23 people who have been apprehended in the dragnet that followed the July 7 murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Several have said they were hired through a Doral, Florida-based firm, CTU Security, led by a Venezuelan émigré Antonio Intriago, who appears to have gone into hiding.

Breaking a relative silence on the events in Haiti, President Duque told La FM radio in Colombia that his administration is providing good leads in the investigation to the middle-of-the-night assassination inside Moïse’s private residence in the hills above Port-au-Prince. His wife, first lady Martine Moïse, was wounded and is currently recovering at a Miami hospital. No one else, including any of the president’s 23-member security detail that night, was killed or apparently shot.

“Everything suggests that an important group of persons arrived in Haiti on a ‘blind hook,’ taken on a supposed protection mission and … a smaller group apparently had detailed information about the criminal operation and the intention to kill the president of Haiti,” Duque said.

The Colombian president revealed that one of the soldiers who was present in Haiti and returned to Colombia has given testimony for the assassination’s investigation. Haitian authorities said 26 Colombians were involved in the armed assault; three were killed and five remained at large.

Duque’s revelations came on the same morning that Colombian National Police Chief Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas Valencia held a news conference that was equally explosive. Highlights of his presentation were tweeted out from his Twitter account.

Three more Colombians are being sought in connection with the assassination, Vargas said, in addition to the three “neutralized,” or dead, and 18 captured. He did not reveal their names, but said the three had met with Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian doctor from South Florida who is in custody in Port-au-Prince and has been called one of the alleged “intellectual authors” of the killing.

Vargas also shed light on the leadership of the group that traveled to Haiti through the Dominican Republic. He said a former Army captain, Germán Alejandro Rivera García, was wired $50,000 from the United States. He did not say by whom, although Haitian authorities, in a news conference late Wednesday, identified both the Doral security company’s owner and a South Florida lender, Walter Vientemilla, as persons of interest. Neither man returned phone calls Thursday afternoon.

The Colombian police chief did not say whether Rivera actually was in Haiti or whether he is the ex-soldier that returned home and is cooperating with the investigation. Vargas also identified as one of the group’s leaders Duberney Capador, a Colombian killed in a firefight with Haitian police during the manhunt for Moïse’s killers.

Vargas said Capador entered Haiti via the Dominican Republic on May 10, months before the assassination. Capador’s sister has told Colombian media she believes her brother was tricked.

Reviewing the Haitian police effort to apprehend the alleged assassins, interim police chief Léon Charles said Thursday that they are questioning all 23 individuals in custody, including the 18 Colombians and five Haitians, some of whom are U.S. citizens.

“The justice has announced the issuance of seven arrest warrants and four individuals who are wanted,” he said.

There are also members of the presidential security team who are also being questioned and four high-ranking officers have been relieved of duties and placed in isolation, Charles said, including the leader of the presidential security team, Dimitri Hérard. Hérard, who is currently the subject of a U.S. arms trafficking investigation, heads the General Security Unit of the National Palace. He has not been formally arrested and his fate, Charles said, depends on the next step in the administrative police probe.

Charles Thursday also denounced a report coming out of Colombia linking Haiti’s acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph to the assassination.

The national police are benefiting from the technical assistance of the FBI and others, including the Colombian police. The information and evidence gathered, Charles said, “have not revealed any link to the prime minister in place.”

Meanwhile, addressing reports that the Miami-area firm CTU Security may have had a contract with the Haitian government to provide security contractors, the head of the Haitian judicial police, which is conducting the probe, said investigators have found no such contract.

The revelations in Colombia put more pressure on the FBI and others in South Florida to explain the roles of Sanon, Intriago and two other South Florida men captured early on: a maintenance man named James Solages and a former DEA informant, Joseph G. Vincent. Haitian police also have two other men in custody: Gilbert Dragon, a soft-spoken former rebel leader who played a key role in the bloody 2004 coup that ousted former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and businessman Reynaldo Corvington. Corvington ran his own security company in Haiti called Corvington Courier & Security Services.

Intriago ran security training classes from his Doral operations, and was a wholesaler and retailer of body armor and other protective gear, sold to the Sweetwater police force among others. He also faced three eviction notices in the last decade and at least one lawsuit from a supplier for non-payment.

Still unclear is the degree to which Intriago knew of what was being planned, or thought he was helping broker security personnel. Haitian police said he made multiple trips there in recent months but have not provided much detail. Haitian police said on Wednesday that he made multiple trips to Haiti ahead of the July 7 assassination.

Also unclear is how the operation was financed. One ex-Colombian soldier who spoke with Caracol radio said he was unable to join the group but shared parts of a Whatsapp thread for the recruitment of commandos. In that thread, the person offering the work in an unidentified Central American nation said the United States would be paying their salaries.

When the assault on the presidential residence began on July 7, a man shouted through a loudspeaker that it was a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operation.

Some of the Colombian commandos have said they believed they were involved in an operation to arrest the Haitian president, perhaps with the goal of turning him over to the DEA or some other U.S. agency. The DEA has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the events, but Haitians are skeptical given that many of the arrested were either informants at one time for the DEA, targets of the DEA or close to people targeted by the agency.