At least 180 people, mostly elderly, have been killed by gang members in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince after a gang leader claimed they were practising “witchcraft” and caused his son’s illness and subsequent death, according to the National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH) and the Haitian Prime Minister’s Office, on Monday, the 9th of December, report the British broadcaster BBC and Reuters.
The UN said that 5 000 people have already been killed this year in Haiti due to rising gang violence.
“A red line has been crossed,” the Haitian prime minister’s office said on Monday, adding that it would “mobilise all forces to track down and annihilate” the perpetrators who had killed around 180 people. The office also accused gang leader Monel Felix, also known as Mikano, of planning the attack.
Rights groups have also claimed that Mikano ordered the killings.
Although details of the massacre are yet to emerge, UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Monday that the number of people killed over the weekend in “violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang” was 184.
Members of the gang reportedly seized dozens of residents, in the area controlled by the gang, from their homes, besieged them and then shot or stabbed them with knives and machetes.
Reports indicate that younger people who had tried to defend their elders were also killed.
Residents reported seeing mutilated corpses burned in the streets.
Local media reported that the gang leader had consulted a voodoo priest who blamed the boy’s mysterious illness on elderly locals allegedly practising “witchcraft”.
Local media reported that people were not allowed to leave the area controlled by the Mikano gang, so news of the deadly killings spread slowly. The group is part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls large parts of the Haitian capital.
Haiti has been gripped by a wave of gang violence since the assassination of then President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.
Gangs control 85% of Port-au-Prince and much of rural Haiti, forcing more than 700 000 people, including many children, to flee their homes, according to the International Organisation for Migration.