Eighteen suspects in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse have been flown from Haiti to South Florida to face federal charges, the Justice Department announced this weekend.
A team from the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, transported the defendants on a military plane to stand trial in the Southern District of Florida, the federal court district that covers Miami. The move brings the total number of people indicted in the killing to 30.
“Today marks the next major phase in our pursuit of accountability,” U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones said. He said prosecutors will follow the evidence to anyone who financed, helped, or supported the plot, adding that five years later, the government is still bringing defendants before American courts and is not finished.
Moïse, 53, was shot 12 times at his private home near Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021, by a hired group of about 20 military-trained Colombian mercenaries. His wife, Martine Moïse, was wounded in the attack. His security detail did not step in to protect him. The killing threw Haiti into deeper political chaos and set off investigations in both Haiti and the United States.
The Justice Department did not name the 18 defendants. Haitian government and police sources told the news agency AFP that the group includes Joseph Félix Badio, a former official in the anti-corruption unit of Haiti’s Justice Ministry, along with Colombian former soldiers. Badio spent more than two years on the run before he was arrested in Haiti in October 2023, and defense attorneys for other defendants in the U.S. case have accused him of playing a central role in the plan that led to the assassination.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Brett Skiles said Moïse was killed by people looking to profit from illicit financial opportunities and business contracts, and that arrests were made this weekend in multiple locations, both in the United States and abroad.
The case is being tried in Miami because U.S. courts have jurisdiction over plots planned on American soil, and prosecutors say much of this one was. In May, four men were convicted in federal court in Miami on charges that included conspiring to kill or kidnap Moïse and violating the Neutrality Act, a federal law that bars people in the United States from organizing military operations against a country the U.S. is at peace with. All four were connected to CTU, a private security company based in Florida, and prosecutors said they were drawn into the plot by the promise of lucrative contracts once Moïse was out of power. They face possible life sentences.
The case in Haiti, meanwhile, had largely stalled. Multiple judges assigned to investigate the killing were replaced or stepped down, and one told the Associated Press in 2023 that his family begged him not to take the case because they feared for his life. Dozens of suspects sat for years in Haiti’s main prison, which is severely overcrowded.
Special Agent in Charge Jose R. Figueroa of HSI Miami called the killing a horrific attack and said investigators are committed to identifying every person who played a role.
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