A funeral was held on Tuesday for a victim of a vicious gang attack in Haiti, which left more than 70 dead and dozens injured.
Jean Louis Jeune Gracien, 41, was buried in Pont-Sondé Tuesday in a simple but emotional ceremony attended by his 14-year-old son, his wife, Ovenia Joaunis, as well as other relatives and friends.
He was one of more than 70 victims in the attack on the town on Thursday, one of Haiti’s biggest massacres in recent history.
Earlier in the day, Gracien’s uncle, Elvens François, recalled the night of the attack as he walked around the cemetery preparing for the burial.
He recalled how he was carrying a plastic bag with his belongings as he prepared to flee his house when three men gripping automatic weapons surrounded him.
One held François from the back while the other two gang members faced him.
“They attacked me, cornered me and took everything from me,” he said, tears in his eyes.
He doesn’t know why he was spared.
A handful of people who remained in the small town in central Haiti after Thursday’s assault blamed the government for the attack by the Gran Grif gang.
Another survivor of the attack who wanted to be identified only as Jacques sat in the cemetery, holding tight to a machete.
Jacques said that the gangs were hiding in an old factory and shooting at people who walked past it.
“The state is responsible. If they had sent armed tanks to secure the population, they would not have died like this,” Jacques said.
Frantz Baptism showed a plastic bag full of bullet shells he collected on the streets after the attack.
Baptism, a security guard, said he saw a local self-defense group trying to keep the gang at bay.
““The resistance pushed them (gang) and they left the area. But when we returned here, we saw bodies everywhere, one dead here, two dead on the other side – bodies all around,” said Baptism.
However, according to Haiti’s National Human Rights Defence Network, it was those very efforts of self-defence that sparked the attack.
The human rights group said in a report that Gran Grif was angry that the self-defence group was trying to limit gang activity and prevent it from profiting off a makeshift road toll it had recently established nearby.
Pont-Sondé was once a bustling community with a thriving marketplace near the mighty Artibonite River, Haiti’s longest.
The streets now lie empty, with padlocked houses and bullet holes in the walls.
Romain Le Cour, senior expert on Haiti for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, called the attack in Pont-Sondé “the most terrifying massacre in decades in Haiti.”
Such massacres were limited to the capital of Port-au-Prince, of which 80% is controlled by gangs and is now being patrolled by Kenyan police leading a U.N.-backed mission struggling with a lack of funds and personnel.
Source: Africanews
