(MIAMI) Three Haitian-Americans and a Colombian were extradited to the United States on Tuesday for their role in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise, US officials said.
The four men detained in Haiti will appear before a federal judge in Miami on Wednesday, according to a press release from the Justice Department.
Before them, three men had already been transferred to the United States to respond to the massacre.
Jovenal Moss, 53, was shot dead by an armed commando between 6 and 7 July 2021 at his private residence in Port-au-Prince without the intervention of his bodyguards. His death further exacerbated the chaos in this small, impoverished country in the Caribbean.
Haitian police soon arrested about forty suspects, including about twenty former Colombian soldiers hired by CTU, a Florida-based security firm. Then the investigation stumbled on the shortcomings of the local judiciary.
American justice is qualified to judge conspiracies on its soil.
After the first three suspects, he charged two Haitian-Americans, James Solages, 37, and Joseph Vincent, 57, and Colombian German Rivera, 44, with “conspiracy to commit murder or trafficking outside United States soil.” »
In a separate indictment, he is prosecuting 54-year-old Christian Sanon, who also holds dual US-Haitian nationality and who harbors “political ambitions” in Haiti, for “unlawfully exporting goods from the United States”.
A US judge alleges that during a meeting in April 2021 in Florida, James Solages and Christian Sanon discussed regime change in Haiti. At the end of their meeting, a list of weapons including rifles, machine guns and grenades was shared.
A month later, Christian Sanon ordered equipment for his “private fighters,” a force of about twenty Colombians under the command of German Rivera and to ensure his safety in Haiti.
In June, he shipped about twenty bulletproof vests to Haiti in violation of U.S. customs formalities — and now he’s been charged.
According to the press release, James Solages, Joseph Vincent and German Rivera met on July 6, 2021 near the president’s house to distribute weapons and initially announced that the mission was to kill Jovenal Moise.
All three were sentenced to life in prison, while Christian Sanon was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
