Lawyer seeks release of Haiti cop accused of police killing while protecting Blinken
The lawyer for a jailed senior Haiti policeman accused of planning the assassination of a motorcycle driver with alleged gang ties is demanding his release from jail.
Mario Delcy filed the request to Investigative Judge Brunet Salomon on Monday on behalf of Haiti National Police officer Livenston Gauthier , the former head of the police substation in Tabarre, where the U.S. Embassy is located. Gauthier, 52, was arrested more than a month ago with a senior police inspector and two informants after Haiti's judicial police accused them of carrying out an extrajudicial killing on the day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the country.
The evidence, including testimony from people named by Gauthier who can vouch for his alibi, doesn't hold up, Delcy said in court documents.
"After the questioning of all the people who had their names mentioned wrongly or rightly in this drama," Delcy wrote, Gauthier "is still kept in detention for a crime he did not commit and that he could not not have committed because of his work and responsibilities on the day of this murder and the interviewees testified without a shadow of a doubt."
A 27-year-veteran of the Haitian National Police, Gauthier is known as one of the beleaguered force's key fighters in its war against armed gangs. His highly controversial Sept. 13 arrest and questionable imprisonment come as Haiti finds itself in the throes of a fresh round of deadly gang attacks and as Prime Minister Garry Conille comes under scrutiny for the hiring of a U.S. based multinational security contractor, Studebaker Defense Group, to help in the fight against gangs without the knowledge of the ruling Transitional Presidential Council.
According to the Haitian national police's 16-page investigative report obtained by the Miami Herald, 25-year-old Hubert Colo, known as Bouki, was sitting on his bike at a taxi stand near St. Damien Pediatric Hospital in Tabarre when a green Isuzu pick-up truck bearing the inscription "POLICE" in yellow pulled up and forced everyone to scatter. Four armed hooded individuals, dressed in black, got out of the truck and fired several bullets at Colo, killing him on the spot and injuring a woman. Police did not provide a motive for Colo's killing, but they said it was an extrajudicial police killing. Several cops claimed that Colo was the subject of a police investigation and was killed due to his ties to gang leader Vitel'homme Innocent, who is accused of carrying our recent attacks in Tabarre and is the subject of a $2 million FBI bounty .
Police say a cousin of Colo, Rony Charles, identified the vehicle as Gauthier's.
Several sources, however, told the Herald that it was impossible for either Gauthier or his vehicle to be at the scene of the crime, which took place at 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 5. At the moment of the killing, the police commissioner was escorting Blinken's motorcade from the U.S. Embassy to the base of the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission near the capital's main airport. Exclusive video obtained by the Herald, and cited by Delcy in his court document, show Gauthier's green pickup at the front of the secretary's motorcade as it arrived at Gate 7 of the Toussaint Louverture International Airport at 4:40 p.m. that day.
Despite the new evidence and testimony from several police officers who were in the motorcade that day, Gauthier has remained in jail, still dressed in his police uniform, along with his alleged co-conspirators. After his initial arrest Gauthier was held in police isolation for nearly three weeks and then transferred to a jail cell at a police station even though a court ordered his immediate release after finding his arrest and prolonged detention to be illegal.
The case has raised questions about how the Haiti National Police, under new command as it tries to stop violent gangs targeting neighborhoods and even U.S. embassy armored vehicles, investigates and treats its own officers. It has also raised questions about a possible police cover up, while reigniting concerns about the use of excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings by the Haitian police, a practice the U.S. government, the United Nations and human-rights groups have long denounced.
One of the police informants who is being accused of shooting Colo told a human-rights group that on the day of the killing not only was he with Gauthier during the time of Colo's death but after they returned from dropping off Blinken, he joined cops assigned to the very police agency, the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police, that carried out the investigation. They were accompanied, the informant said, by the same prosecutor, Carl Giovanni Aubourg, who is now opposing their releases from jail and forwarded the case against them an investigative judge for criminal charges.
Solomon, the investigative judge, has heard from several police officers, including one of the heads of the Departmental District Ouest region of metropolitan Port-au-Prince, Xavier Seide. Seide, who arrived at the judge's offices on Friday with armored vehicles and surrounded by cops, referred questions from the Herald to a police spokesman, saying he could not discuss an ongoing investigation.
Solomon has not said if he will release Gauthier or drop the case against him and the others.
