‘A blatant show of force’ Rising terror in Haiti after 115 killed in reprisal attack

The killers came under the cover of darkness, stealing across the Artibonite River on an abandoned bridge before marauding through this rural community with automatic rifles and knives.

- Etienne Côté-Paluck ,Tom Phillips

“[They] were like headless chickens, shooting at anyone they saw,” said Louisseul François, a resident of the Haitian town of Pont-Sondé, who somehow survived the slaughter.

François heard the first shots of the gang invasion at about 3am, leapt from his bed and gathered at the town entrance with members of a local vigilante group called “the coalition”. Despite their attempts to organise, its members soon realised they were outgunned. They fled into the surrounding hills, where petrified locals were cowering. “The gangs shot at anything that moved - even dogs … They came to wipe out the whole area. It was a premeditated massacre,” said François, 41, who lost six friends and relatives in the onslaught.

His voice shaking, François described the scenes he saw later that morning when he returned to the area with police who had pushed back the intruders. The assailants had forced their way into homes, murdering anyone they could find. At one junction, François saw four corpses near a house that was going up in flames. Further ahead, a school and a health clinic had been torched. On one street alone, 19 bodies were splayed in the dirt. “Men, women and a three-year-old child,” said the father of three.

Those scenes, while horrifying, represented only a fraction of the butchery, with the full death toll only becoming clear almost a week after the attack.

At least 115 people are now believed to have been shot or stabbed to death when gang members swept through Pont-Sondé in apparent retribution for the market town’s refusal to submit to the authority of their group. The victims reportedly included babies and elderly people.

One of those killed was François’s cousin, whose body - the first that he discovered - was found lying in a pool of blood. “His head had been shattered by bullets and his chest sliced open with a machete,” François said after attending three funerals in one day.