Haiti recorded 1,167 killings in three months, UN says
Gangs caused fewer than half of the victims. Most of the rest died in security force operations, and kidnappings and killings attributed to police are rising.
At least 1,167 people were killed and 459 wounded in Haiti between July and September, according to a quarterly human rights report from the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti, known as BINUH, released Wednesday. The tally covers Port-au-Prince and its metropolitan area, as well as the Artibonite and Southeast departments.
Gangs caused more than 45% of the casualties. Roughly half of the rest occurred during security force operations against those groups, and self-defense militias accounted for about 5%. More than 16% of the people killed in official operations had no gang ties.
Haitian National Police were involved in 44 extrajudicial executions or attempted executions. The previous quarter had 14.
Kidnappings for ransom rose too, to at least 137 from 81 between April and June. Children made up 10% of the victims. Gangs also sexually assaulted 344 people, ages 8 to 75, and 77% of the cases were gang rapes.
Two attacks in Kenscoff, one in July and one in August, killed at least 105 people, 19 of them children. In Gressier in August, at least 32 teenagers ages 14 to 16, forcibly recruited by a gang, died in clashes with security forces. Explosive drones killed at least four people, two of them children, and in some cases a private military company took part.
Violence is now reaching areas that gangs did not previously control, such as Saint-Michel-de-l'Attalaye in Artibonite and Marigot in the Southeast.
BINUH chief Carlos Ruiz Massieu called for strengthening "both the mechanisms to protect the population" and the presence of the state in areas gangs lose. The report urges the international community to finish deploying the Gang Suppression Force as soon as possible, and asks Haitian authorities to better protect victims and strengthen disarmament and reintegration programs.
