PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 27, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – More than 400 prisoners were on
the run in Haiti on Friday a day after they escaped from jail in a violent
breakout that left 25 people dead, including the prison director, officials
said.
AFP photographs showed at least three dead bodies lying outside the prison
on Thursday and some captured prisoners under armed guard in the back of a
truck.
“Twenty-five people died including six prisoners and Divisional Inspector
Paul Hector Joseph who was in charge of the prison,” Secretary of
Communication Frantz Exantus said of the Thursday’s mass escape from the jail
in the suburbs of capital Port-au-Prince.
“Among those killed were some ordinary citizens who were killed by the
prisoners during their escape,” Exantus told a press conference, adding 1,125
of the 1,542 prisoners at the Croix-des-Bouquets jail were in their cells on
Friday morning.
One of the inmates who died was gang leader Arnel Joseph, who was gunned
down on Friday at a police check 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the
prison.
“Arnel Joseph was killed while attacking a police patrol which had stopped
the motorcycle he was on. The police responded and Arnel Joseph is dead,”
Exantus said.
Joseph, allegedly head of one of Haiti’s main criminal networks, was
arrested in 2019 and had tried to escape from the prison last July after
advertising his plan in a social media video a few days before the attempt.
While serving a sentence for murder, Joseph had already escaped twice from
another prison, in Port-au-Prince, in 2010 and 2017.
Inaugurated in 2012, the high-security Croix-des-Bouquets prison was built
with funding from Canada and has a maximum capacity of 872 inmates, although
nearly double that number were incarcerated there before the escape.