International

Haitian businessman Rodolphe “Dodof” Jaar provided more than $150,000 in cash and material support — including housing and semi-automatic weapons — to back the plot that ultimately led to the assassination of his country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, he told a Miami federal jury. That support included $110,000 in bribes paid to members of the presidential security team —$80,000 to the General Security Unit of the National Palace and $30,000 to the Counter Assault Team — who were responsible for protecting Moïse on the night a squad of Colombian commandos stormed his residence in the hills above Port-au-Prince.

Anti-gang operations in Haiti have slowed the expansion of powerful armed groups in Port-au-Prince, a UN expert report said Tuesday, though progress remains uneven. Authorities, backed by drone strikes and self-defence groups, have curbed advances, but gangs continue adapting amid a prolonged security crisis in the country. Anti-gang operations in Haiti have halted the powerful armed groups' expansion in the capital, but progress remains uneven and they are adapting, a UN expert report said Tuesday.

When armed gangs shattered four months of relative calm in Haiti’s Lower Artibonite region last month, the violence didn’t just claim lives. It also added to the pressures of an already strained humanitarian system. The attacks, along with the ongoing violence in the Center and West regions forced another 20,000 people to flee their homes. Many, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, were fleeing for the second time. “Clearly the situation in the Artibonite, and in Port-au-Prince, remains very volatile,” said Grégoire Goodstein, the organization’s chief of mission for Haiti, where the U.N. agency tracks the internally displaced and provides emergency aid.

At least 30 people are dead, many of them school-age children as young as 12, after a gathering advertised on TikTok turned tragic on Saturday at Haiti’s premier mountaintop fortress. The deaths were confirmed by Haiti Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who told the Miami Herald “the government is mobilizing” the ministry of health, justices of the peace to respond to the tragedy. The deaths occurred at the historic Citadelle Laferrière fortress in the town of Milot when heavy rains sent the children into a panic, triggering a stampede around 4 p.m.

D’après le directeur du bureau de la protection civile pour le nord d’Haïti, le bilan pourrait encore s’alourdir en raison du grand nombre de personnes portées disparues.