Haiti’s leader kept a list of drug traffickers. His assassins came for it.

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  Haiti's President Jovenel Moise speaks at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince in October last year. | REUTERS

  by Maria Abi-HabibTHE NEW YORK TIMES

 

PORT-AU-PRINCE – President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti was about to name names.

Before being assassinated in July, he had been working on a list of powerful politicians and business people involved in Haiti’s drug trade, with the intention of handing over the dossier to the U.S. government, according to four senior Haitian advisers and officials tasked with drafting the document.

The president had ordered the officials to spare no one, not even the power brokers who had helped propel him into office, they said — one of several moves against suspected drug traffickers that could explain a motive for the assassination.

When gunmen burst into Moïse’s residence and killed him in his bedroom, his wife, Martine Moïse — who had also been shot and lay bleeding on the floor, pretending to be dead — described how they stayed to search the room, hurriedly digging through his files.

“‘That’s it,’ ” they finally declared to one another before fleeing, she told The New York Times in her first interview after the assassination, adding that she did not know what the gunmen had taken.

Investigators arrived at the crime scene to find Jovenel Moïse’s home office ransacked, papers strewn everywhere. In interrogations, some of the captured hit men confessed that retrieving the list Moïse had been working on — with the names of suspected drug traffickers — was a top priority, according to three senior Haitian officials with knowledge of the investigation.

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