LES CAYES, Haiti — When the earth shook violently on Jan. 12, the inmates in this southern city’s squalid prison clamored to be released, screaming: “Help! We’re going to die in here.”
Elsewhere in Haiti, inmates were fleeing largely undeterred. But here, where the prison itself sustained little damage, there was no exit. Instead, conditions worsened for the inmates, three-quarters of them pretrial detainees, arrested on charges as petty as loitering and locked up indefinitely alongside convicted felons.
After the earthquake, guards roughed up the noisiest inmates and consolidated them into cells so crowded their limbs tangled, former prisoners said. With aftershocks jangling nerves, the inmates slept in shifts on the ground, used buckets for toilets and plotted their escape.
The escape plan, set in motion on Jan. 19 by an attack on a guard, proved disastrous. With Haitian and United Nations police officers encircling the prison, the detainees could not get out. For hours, they rampaged, hacking up doors and burning records, until tear gas finally overwhelmed them.
In the end, after the Haitian police stormed the compound, dozens of inmates lay dead and wounded, their bodies strewn through the courtyard and crumpled inside cells. The prison smoldered, a blood-splattered mess.
Haitian officials here say they did not use lethal force but rather found lifeless bodies when they entered the prison. They attribute the killings to a prison ringleader who, they say, slaughtered his fellow inmates before hopping over the wall and disappearing.
But an investigation by The New York Times casts doubt on the official version of events and instead indicates that Haitian authorities shot unarmed prisoners and then sought to cover it up. Many of the bodies were buried in an unmarked grave.
Kesnel Jeudi, a recently released inmate, said in an interview that nobody was dead when the police rushed the prison. “They shouted: ‘Prisoners, lie down. Lie down. Lie down,’ ” he said. “When the prisoners lay down — while the prisoners were lying down — they began firing.”
Mr. Jeudi, 28, said the police shootings involved some settling of scores: “There were people they selected to kill.”
Four months later, the death toll remains unknown. But most accounts place it between 12 and 19, with up to 40 wounded. The local morgue attendant, Georges Raymond, said that he initially registered 11 dead detainees, with several more arriving later after they died of bullet wounds at the adjacent hospital.
Prison officials would not allow The Times to enter the walled prison compound, which sits directly behind the police station in the heart of town. But reporters interviewed six witnesses to the disturbance as well as five others who visited the prison either immediately after the shootings or the next day. None saw inmates firing weapons or any evidence that inmates killed inmates. Instead, witnesses said the police shot unarmed prisoners, some in the prison yard, others in their cells. Afterward, the authorities failed to notify inmates’ relatives of the deaths, buried bodies without conducting autopsies and burned the surviving prisoners’ bloodstained clothing and shoes.
Myrtil Yonel, a human rights leader here, said, “For us, we consider this to be a massacre.”
Under a bare bulb in his office beside the prison, Olritch Beaubrun, the superintendent of the antiriot police unit, scoffed at this accusation. He said that a detainee nicknamed Ti Mousson had slaughtered inmates who resisted his escape plan.
“Ti Mousson put down the 12 detainees,” Superintendent Beaubrun said. “We did not. We never fired our guns.”
This assertion is at odds with what The Times found after reviewing confidential Haitian and United Nations reports and conducting interviews with former detainees, guards, prison cooks, wardens, police officials, judicial officials and relatives of dead prisoners.
Among other things, United Nations police officers noted that day in an internal incident report that the Haitian police had used firearms. The cooks, three women trapped inside during the riot, said that the detainees did no shooting. No weapons were recovered. Ti Mousson — whose real name is Luguens Cazeau — escaped. And the authorities did not treat the prison as the crime scene of what they portrayed as a mass murder by Mr. Cazeau, who was awaiting trial on charges of stealing a satellite dish.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/americas/23haiti.html?hp
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