PORT-AU-PRINCE — A senior police precinct chief in Haiti, jailed in the assassination of a motorcycle driver with alleged gang ties, has been freed from a Port-au-Prince jail along with a senior police inspector and two informants.
Livenston Gauthier, the former head of the Tabarre police substation, was released after Investigative Judge Brunet Salomon issued an order Wednesday for prosecutors to release him from a jail cell inside the Canape Vert police station. The order covered him, senior police inspector Jean Claude Aimé and two informants who were arrested in September. The four were detained after investigators with Haiti’s judicial police accused them of carrying out the execution of Hubert Colo, 25, as he sat on his bike at a taxi stand near St. Damien Pediatric Hospital in Tabarre, not far from the U.S. embassy, on September 5.
The extrajudicial killing occurred on the same day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the country. Gauthier, who was head of the Tabarre police substation, was part of Blinken’s security detail and he was accompanied by the three men in his police vehicle.
There was a key problem with the evidence against Gauthier: An exclusive video obtained by the Miami Herald showed that at the time of the killing, Gauthier’s dark green truck, which police say was used in the execution, was instead leading Blinken’s motorcade as the U.S. diplomat arrived at the VIP entrance of Toussaint Louverture International Airport.
The footage was part of the evidence attorney Mario Delcy presented to the judge earlier this month when he requested Gauthier’s release, arguing that the 25-year veteran of the force with a reputation for fighting gangs could not be in two places at the same time.
Delcy said Wednesday that the two months and 14 days that Gauthier and the others spent under arrest shows that “Haiti is a country with a lot of injustice, where the people who know the law, studied the law decided to deliberately violate the law and the rights of four people in this country.”
From the outset the police and the judiciary could have simply verified that the day Colo was killed Gauthier “was in Antony Blinken’s motorcade, with a lot of other policemen,” Delcy said.
He accused several officials, including the police director, the police inspector general, the government prosecutor and former justice minister, of being complicit in having Gauthier arrested. Gauthier was arrested after the U.S. Embassy was alerted about the blatant killing not far from its premises. Embassy officials responded by telling the Haitian police force to do its job.
Instead, Delcy said authorities arrested his client in an attempt to frame him for what investigators say was a police operation. They “held the commissioner in prison on the pretext that the U.S. Embassy and the Department of State gave orders to hold the commissioner in prison,” Delcy said, echoing comments that were repeatedly heard from Haitian officials when commenting about the case.
Salomon, the investigative judge, gave his recommendation to free Gauthier and his co-conspirators a week ago. But Croix-des-Bouquets prosecutor Carl Giovanni Aubourg, who had the men jailed, dragged the process out, forcing a visit from a human rights defender followed by several phone calls.
“Today he is free and … is waiting to go back to work to continue to protect and serve the population just how he has been doing for more than 25 years,” Delcy said of Gauthier, who is among several cops in the country who had their homes taken over by armed gangs.
This is not the first high-profile case involving extrajudicial police killings. Last week, the French medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, suspended operations in the capital, citing police threats and attacks after an alleged execution of two of its patients by police and a vigilante group. Neither the police nor the government has made any public statements about the allegations.
The investigation into Colo’s killing has raised serious concerns about how the police force, under new command as it tries to fight a new wave of gang violence, investigates and treats its own officers and carries out investigations. It has also raised questions about corruption in the judiciary and a possible police cover up, with supporters of Gauthier insisting he was the target of personal vendettas.
“Justice has triumphed over arbitrariness. The arrest was badly done and there was abuse,” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Port-au-Prince. “These types of things cannot continue. If the first response is to arrest and humiliate police officers, especially those involved in the fight against gangs… it will discourage police officers.”
The case attracted the attention of residents of Tabarre, who protested Gauthier’s arrest, and human-rights groups concerned about abuse within the Haiti National Police.
Marie Yolene Gilles, an activist who follows police issues closely, paid a visit to the Canape-Vert prison where she met with Gauthier and other jailed police officers. Esperance, meanwhile, assigned one of his staff to stay on top of Gauthier’s case, including tracking down the prosecutor on Tuesday and Wednesday to sign court documents after the release was ordered.
If not for this assistance, Esperance said, “Gauthier and the others would still be in prison.”
Gauthier’s release does not end the case. However, when an investigative judge orders a prisoner released, it often signals that he will eventually decide not to bring charges because the evidence gathered during his inquiry did not meet the burden of proof.
Several sources told the Herald that Colo, who was known as Bouki, was the subject of a year-long police investigation due to his involvement in drug trafficking and his ties to Vitel’homme Innocent, the powerful Haiti gang leader who is the subject of a $2 million FBI bounty.
Police investigators made no mention of the alleged connection in their 16-page investigative report, obtained by the Herald. They say that four armed hooded individuals, dressed in black, shot Colo in the head and injured a woman nearby after jumping out of a green Isuzu pick-up truck bearing the inscription “POLICE” in yellow.
The operation, they said, was an extrajudicial police killing, and claimed the truck belonged to Gauthier. They did not say what time the killing took place, but a judge’s report obtained by the Herald and a source with knowledge of the operation said the execution happened at 4:30 p.m.
By JACQUELINE CHARLES/Miami Herald
