Police in Haiti said they shot dead four people they suspected of assassinating president Jovenel Moïse and arrested two others after a day of firefights and heightened tension in the capital Port-au-Prince.
The country’s police chief León Charles told a news conference his men had also freed three police officers who were taken hostage by the assassins.
Moïse, 53, was killed in his home in an affluent suburb of the city in the early hours of Wednesday. The government blamed “a group of unidentified individuals, some of whom were speaking Spanish”. Interim prime minister Claude Joseph said the killers had also spoken in English.
Joseph appealed to the Caribbean nation’s population of 11m for calm and condemned what he called an “odious, inhuman and barbaric act” in which Moïse’s wife Martine was also seriously wounded. She was flown to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for treatment. Joseph said she was in a stable condition.
“It can be confirmed that this was a well co-ordinated attack by a highly trained and heavily armed group,” the Haitian government said in a statement.
The president’s murder prompted international condemnation and concern. US president Joe Biden described the situation in Haiti as “very worrisome” and said Washington stood ready to help. UN secretary-general António Guterres called on Haitians to “remain united in the face of this abhorrent act” and preserve the constitutional order. The Organization of American States condemned an “affront” to the “community of democratic nations”.
Amnesty International said it was “concerned at the potential escalation of violence in coming days” and described the killing — Haiti’s first assassination of a head of state in more than a century — as “a wake-up call to the international community”.
Joseph has called on the UN security council to discuss the situation in Haiti as soon as possible.
“I have just presided over an extraordinary council of ministers meeting and we have decided to declare a state of emergency in the whole country,” Joseph said.
Residents of Port-au-Prince reported the sound of heavy gunfire in the city during the day. Videos circulating on social media showed plumes of smoke rising over some parts of the city, although they could not be independently verified.
“But there’s a big concern over what happens next,” one foreign businessman in Port-au-Prince said. “Most of the opposition is as bad or worse than this guy was.”
The neighbouring Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, closed the border between the two nations. Its president Luis Abinader called an emergency meeting.
Moïse, a former banana exporter turned politician, had been ruling by decree since October 2019 when parliamentary elections were scrapped. His legitimacy was repeatedly questioned, with the opposition and many legal experts arguing that his presidential term had expired.
Mass protests over allegations of government corruption and involvement in gang violence punctuated his time in office, although he consistently denied involvement.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has suffered repeated political and economic crises in recent years, as well as several natural disasters. It has struggled to rebuild since a devastating earthquake in 2010 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
Jake Johnston, an expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington who recently visited Haiti’s capital, described the country as a “terrifying situation, not just because of [the assassination] but because of the broader situation of insecurity and violence”.
Moïse had planned to hold fresh elections and a constitutional referendum in September, but the opposition had questioned whether these could be free and fair.
A group of US lawmakers wrote to Antony Blinken, secretary of state, in April expressing “serious and urgent” concern over the deteriorating situation and saying the Moïse government was “failing to meet even the most basic needs of its citizens”.