(Miami) Former Haitian senator John Joel Joseph, wanted by the authorities of Haiti in the investigation into the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, was arrested in Jamaica, we learned on Saturday from a Jamaican police source.
Posted at 2:22 p.m.
Updated at 2:54 p.m.
He was arrested overnight from Friday to Saturday and is currently in detention, said this source without commenting on the rest of the procedure.
She confined herself to explaining that the Jamaican police were acting in coordination with their “international partners” and that “joint investigations” were underway.
The source also did not want to say where exactly on the Caribbean island the former elected Haitian had been arrested, nor if he had been arrested in the company of other people.
The Haitian president was killed in July, but despite the arrest of several suspects, many gray areas persist around his murder.
As early as July, the Haitian authorities had launched a wanted notice against John Joel Joseph, described as a “dangerous and armed” individual.
Earlier this month, Mario Palacios, a former Colombian soldier accused of having been part of the group of about twenty men who killed Jovenel Moïse and seriously injured his wife in their presidential residence in Port-au-Prince, on July 7 2021, has been charged in the United States. He was also initially arrested in Jamaica before accepting a “voluntary extradition” to American justice, and faces life imprisonment.
Under an Interpol red notice for “murder and complicity in murder”, Mario Palacios had been recruited in June 2021 to arrest and kidnap the Haitian president, according to the American federal police.
The plan would then have changed and the group, under the direction of a man identified as “co-conspirator number 1”, would have been tasked with killing Jovenel Moïse.
More than 40 people, including fifteen Colombians and Americans of Haitian origin, have already been arrested as part of the investigation.
But many questions remain as to the motivations behind this assassination, which has further plunged into uncertainty the Caribbean country plagued by poverty, insecurity and corruption.
The Haitian investigation did not make it possible to determine the identity of the sponsors.
The US Congress for its part this week ordered the opening of an investigation into the assassination.