US: US court sentences assassination mastermind to life in prison
By Ahmad Hadizat Omayoza, Mamos Nigeria
A Florida federal court judge has given a man who planned the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Mose two years ago a life sentence.
On July 7, 2021, a group of Colombian mercenaries and the Haitian-Chilean businessman Rodolphe Jaar planned to kill Mose at his home in Port-au-Prince. At his sentencing hearing in Miami, the prosecution said that Jaar bought the weapons that were used in the “commando-style” attack that killed Mose, 53, and injured his wife badly.
In March, Jaar, 50, a drug trafficker who was convicted and an informant for the US government, pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill or kidnap people outside of the US and providing material support that led to the death.
After being extradited from the Dominican Republic, he was one of eleven people arrested and charged in the United States, but he has so far only admitted guilt. According to authorities, the others’ trial is scheduled to begin in Miami next month but is likely to be postponed.
The maximum punishment Jaar could have received was the sentence imposed by federal judge José E. Martnez. According to court documents from his plea hearing, he provided personnel and funds for the kidnapping of Mose, but the plan turned into a murder.
Prosecutors said that some of the money was used to buy weapons and bribe members of the president’s security detail.
Former Haitian senator Joseph Joel John, Haitian-American Joseph Vincent, retired Colombian army captain Germán Rivera, and Antonio Intriago, the Venezuelan owner of a private security firm in Miami, are among his alleged co-conspirators.
According to Colombian authorities, Rivera received $50,000 for contributing to the plot.
In a statement released in May of last year, the US Department of Justice announced John’s extradition from Jamaica and provided details of the murder plan.
Bocchit Edmond, the Haitian ambassador to the United States at the time, told the Guardian at the time that the conspirators met several times in Haiti and Florida to complete the operation. an inhumane act. It’s an attack on our democracy. First lady Martine Marie Étienne Mose, who has since recovered, said in 2021 that the people who killed her husband “came to kill his dream, his vision, and his ideology” for the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
A protestor adds a tire to a consuming blockade during a police show to fight the new killings of six cops by equipped packs, in Port-au-Sovereign, Haiti, January 26, 2023.
Since the death, Haiti has plunged into emergency, with viciousness from road posses and vigilantes predominant, and networks retaliating with ridiculous backlashes of their own.
In March, Ecuadorian diplomat Mara Isabel Salvador told the UN security council, “Faced with these increasingly violent armed gangs vying for control of neighborhoods of the capital, with limited or no police presence, some residents have begun to take matters into their own hands.”
“These dynamics consistently result in the breakdown of the social fabric, which has unpredictable consequences for the entire region.”
