Warning: This story contains details that may upset some readers
While the details of the massacre are still emerging, UN human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday put the death toll at 184 over the weekend “as a result of violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang”.
The murder took place in the metropolitan area of Cite Salei.
According to reports, gang members seized scores of residents over the age of 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area, grabbed them, and then shot or stabbed them with knives and machetes.
Residents reported that mutilated bodies were being burned in the streets.
The RNDDH estimated that 60 people were killed on Friday and another 50 were captured and killed on Saturday after the gang leader’s son died of an illness.
While the RNDDH said all the victims were in their 60s, another human rights group said some young people who tried to protect the elderly were also killed.
Local media reported that the elderly, believed to be practicing voodoo, were singled out because the gang leader was told they had caused his son’s illness.
Human rights groups said Manel Felix, also known as Mikano, was the mastermind behind the killings.
Mikana is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic area in the port of the capital.
According to Romain Le Coeur Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but difficult for security forces to penetrate.
Local media reported that Mikan’s gang prevented residents from leaving Jeremy’s Wharf, so news of the deadly killings spread slowly.
The group is part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls most of Haiti’s capital.
Haiti has been gripped by a wave of gang violence since the 2021 assassination of then-president Jovenel Moise.
Data collected by GI-TOC, external shows that between May and September of this year, the number of murders fell after the rival gangs reached an uneasy truce.
But the gangs’ attempts to expand beyond their strongholds in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the past two months, with attacks increasingly targeting ordinary residents rather than rival gangs.
On October 3, 115 local residents were killed in the town of Pont-Sonde in the Artibanit department.
The killing was reportedly carried out by Gran Griff’s gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist Gran Griff’s attempts to extort the locals.
If confirmed, the death toll given by the UN for this weekend’s killings in Cite Salei would be the deadliest incident this year.
Gangs control approximately 85% of Port-au-Prince and growing swaths of the countryside, forcing hundreds of thousands of Haitians from their homes.
According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 700,000 people – half of them children – are internally displaced across the country.
Gang members often use sexual violence, including gang rape, to terrorize the local population.
In a report released two weeks ago, externalHuman Rights Watch researcher Natalie Cotrino wrote that “the rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal gangs rape young women without fear of any consequences.”
Attempts by the Kenyan-led multinational security support mission to end the violence have so far failed.
An international police force arrived in Haiti in June to reinforce the Haitian National Police, but lacks the funding and equipment needed to fight the heavily armed gangs.
Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) – the body set up to organize elections and restore democratic order – appears to be in disarray.
The TPC replaced the caretaker prime minister last month and does not appear to have made much progress in organizing elections.
“They rule over a mountain of ash,” GI-TOC’s Romain Le Coeur Grandmaison wrote of the council in his report.
