A massacre of more than 200 people in Haiti this month followed a gang-ordered manhunt that saw victims, many of them elderly, pulled from their homes and shot or killed with machetes, the UN said on Monday.
The victims were suspected of involvement in voodoo and accused by a gang leader of poisoning his child, with the suspects taken to a “training centre” where many were dismembered or burned after being killed.
A civil society organisation had said at the time that the gang leader was convinced his son’s illness was caused by followers of the religion.
“On the evening of December 6, (Micanor Altes) ordered the members of his gang – around 300 – to carry out a brutal ‘manhunt.’ They stormed into about 10 alleys of the (Port-au-Prince) neighbourhood and forcibly dragged the victims out of their homes,” said the report, wrote jointly by the UN office in Haiti, BINUH, and the UN Human Rights Commissioner (OCHR).
In the days that followed, the gang returned to the neighbourhood, abducting adherents from a voodoo temple, targeting individuals suspected of tipping off local media and slaughtering people seeking to escape.
Some of the bodies “were then burned with petrol, or dismembered and dumped into the sea,” the report concluded.
A total of 134 men and 73 women were killed in total over six days, the report said.