(RSF/IFEX) – On the seventh anniversary of radio Haïti Inter owner and manager Jean Dominique’s murder on 3 April 2000 in Port-au-Prince, Reporters Without Borders notes with regret that the investigation that was re-launched two years ago has still not yielded any results and impunity continues to prevail in this case. “It will clearly take […]
(RSF/IFEX) – On the seventh anniversary of radio Haïti Inter owner and manager Jean Dominique’s murder on 3 April 2000 in Port-au-Prince, Reporters Without Borders notes with regret that the investigation that was re-launched two years ago has still not yielded any results and impunity continues to prevail in this case.
“It will clearly take time to put an end to violent crime and the rule of gangs, one of which executed news photographer Jean-Rémy Badiau on 19 January [2007], and to rebuild the Haitian judicial system,” the press freedom organisation said.
“But there really appeared to be a new start to the Dominique investigation in 2006 with the election of President René Préval, a friend of the victim, and the appointment of Claudy Gassant, the original investigating magistrate in the case, as Port-au-Prince chief prosecutor,” Reporters Without Borders added. “So why have none of the alleged killers, whose identity and whereabouts are known, been arrested? The longer this goes on, the harder it will be to render justice.”
The investigation into Dominique’s murder concluded on 21 March 2003, three years after he and Haïti Inter receptionist Jean-Claude Louissaint were gunned down in the radio station’s courtyard. It resulted in the arrest and charging of six men: Dymsley “Ti Lou” Milien, Jeudi “Guimy” Jean-Daniel, Philippe Markington, Ralph Léger, Freud Junior Demarattes and Ralph Joseph. The charges against the last three were dropped on 4 August 2003, after they appealed the indictment.
Former Port-au-Prince deputy mayor Harold Sévère and Ostide “Douze” Pétion were arrested on 14 March 2004 as the suspected instigators of the murder. Annette Auguste, who was already being held in connection with another case, was also indicted on 10 March 2005. None of the three has ever been interrogated, nor has there been any attempt to verify alleged hit-man Ti Lou’s statement that he was paid US$10,000 to murder Dominique. Moreover, the death of two witnesses in suspicious circumstances has never been explained.
Ti Lou, Guimy and Markington managed to escape during a prison riot in February 2005. Markington fled to Argentina, from where he contacted Reporters Without Borders to insist on his innocence. During a visit to Port-au-Prince in September 2005, a Reporters Without Borders delegation was told by several sources close to the Dominique case that Ti Lou and Guimy were still in Port-au-Prince, in the neighbourhood of Martissant, where they were running a gang with complete impunity.
On 29 June 2004, following Reporters Without Borders’s first investigating mission to Port-au-Prince, the Supreme Court ordered the Dominique case reopened. But it took nearly a year for a new investigating judge to be appointed, on 3 April 2005, exactly five years after the murder. The new judge has not had access to the case files and has not been given the necessary resources to continue the investigation.
