Haiti - Pétion-ville : A merchant eviction operation goes wrong, 1 dead
Thursday afternoon, during a raid carried out by police officers from the Town Hall of Pétion-ville against merchants who illegally occupied the sidewalks of the town, a young bookseller of about twenty years was fatally hit by two bullets at the head during a clash with municipal police officers.
According to the witnesses, this major incident occurred when several merchants refused to leave the site and faced a police committed to enforcing the law. This death caused a strong tension, a certain panic and a spontaneous manifestation of the merchants who erected a barricade of inflamed tires on one of the main axes of Pétion-ville.
The Haitian National Police (PNH) intervened to keep distant the angry merchants who refused that the body of the victim was removed from the place, for fear that no investigation is opened. The departure of the ambulance with the body of the victim has fanned the anger of the crowd, and the PNH had to shoot in the air and make use of tear gas to disperse the protesters and restore order public.
Neither the mayor Dominique Saint-Roc present on the scene nor the PNH wished to respond to the press.
It should be recalled that these eviction operations, which have been going on for several months at the initiative of several town halls in the metropolitan area to free the sidewalks and streets, had so far never before caused the death of a merchant.
