PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The United Nations has raised the death toll from a recent massacre in which dozens of elders and Vodou religious leaders were killed by a gang in Haiti, calling on officials to bring the perpetrators to justice .
The UN Integrated Office in Haiti said in a report published on Monday that more than 207 people were killed by the Wharf Jeremy gang between December 6 and 11. The gang took people from their homes and a place of worship, interrogated them and then executed them with bullets and machetes.
Earlier this month, human rights groups in Haiti had estimated that more than a hundred people were killed in the massacre, but the new UN investigation doubles the number of victims.
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“We cannot pretend that nothing has happened,” said María Isabel Salvador, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative in Haiti.
“I call on the Haitian justice system to thoroughly investigate these heinous crimes and arrest and punish the perpetrators and those who support them,” she said in a statement.
Human rights groups in Haiti said the massacre began after the son of Micanor Altès, the leader of the Wharf Jeremie gang, died of an illness.
The Cooperative for Peace and Development, a human rights organization, said that, according to information circulating in the community, Altès accused people in the neighborhood of causing his son’s illness.
“He decided to brutally punish all elders and (Vodou) practitioners who, in his imagination, would be able to cast a bad spell on his son,” the group said in a statement released shortly after news of the massacre came out.
In Monday’s report, the United Nations said people were tracked down in their homes and at a place of worship by Altès’ gang, where they were first interrogated and then taken to an execution site.
The United Nations said the gang tried to erase evidence of the killings by burning bodies or dismembering them and throwing them into the sea.
The massacre is the latest humanitarian tragedy in Haiti, where gang violence has increased since the country’s president was killed in an attempted coup in 2021.
Haiti is struggling to organize elections that will fill the power vacuum and restore democratic rule.
The Caribbean country is currently governed by a transitional council that includes representatives from business, civil society and political parties, but the government does not control many parts of the capital, and gangs constantly fight over ports, highways and neighborhoods.
More than 5,350 people have been killed in gang wars in Haiti this year, according to the United Nations.
The Haitian government acknowledged the massacre of the elderly in a statement earlier this month and vowed to prosecute those responsible for the act of “unspeakable carnage.”
