Politics- Haitian President
Jovenel Moïse was shot dead by a group of assailants at his home last week. - Haitian police said on Sunday that they had arrested one of the masterminds of the attack.
- They said the man, a Florida doctor, wanted to seize the presidency and hire the hitmen as guards.
The American man suspected of hatching the plot to assassinate Haiti's leader wanted to steal the presidency for himself and hire the killers as his bodyguards, the police said.
President Jovenel Moïse was shot dead in his bedroom in Port-au-Prince on Wednesday. The police in
On Sunday, Léon Charles, the country's police chief, announced that officers had arrested a man believed to be one of the masterminds of the operation, The Associated Press reported.
Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a 63-year-old Haitian-born American who worked as a doctor in Florida, flew to Haiti on a private jet in early June with "political objectives," Charles said, according to The Washington Post.
Some of the men involved in the assassination joined him on the plane, Charles said.
Charles said Sanon had planned to steal the presidency from Moïse and wanted to hire the hitmen to be his personal bodyguards, The Post reported.
Charles said that at Sanon's home in Haiti the police found a hat with the logo of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, 20 boxes of bullets, gun parts, four license plates from the Dominican Republic, and two cars, the AP reported.
Videos suggested that the assassins had posed as members of the DEA before they killed Moïse, the Miami Herald reported.
The men were initially hired to travel to Haiti to protect Sanon, but their orders soon changed to arresting Moïse, Charles said.
Two Haitian Americans arrested in connection with the killing told authorities that the group's intention was not to kill Moïse but to arrest him and take him to the presidential palace, the Miami Herald and Reuters reported.
The pair said that they were translators for the Colombian commando unit and that they'd had an arrest warrant for Moïse but he was dead by the time they arrived, a source told Reuters. It wasn't clear who had issued the warrant and how the men would have obtained it.
After Moïse, who was shot 12 times, was dead, one of the suspects called Sanon to update him, Charles said.
Charles added that two other people, whom he did not name, were also thought to have masterminded the plot.
In a 2011 video posted on YouTube titled "Leadership for Haiti," Sanon slammed Haiti's political elite. "They don't care about the country," he said. "They don't care about the people."
Haiti has asked the US to send troops to help stabilize the country; the US is "analyzing" whether to do so, a Pentagon spokesman said on Sunday. Senior officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security arrived in Haiti on Sunday to discuss how the US could help, The Post reported.
The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, told "Fox News Sunday" that the US was considering its options.
"We're analyzing it, just like we would any other request for assistance here at the Pentagon," he said. "It's going through a review."