A total of 11 people face charges in the Southern District of Florida in connection with the investigation into Moïse’s 2021 death, which unleashed chaos in the small Caribbean country.
Four men were arrested in Florida on Tuesday in connection with the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, officials said.
Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, 50; Antonio Intriago 59; Walter Veintemilla, 54; and Frederick Bergmann, 64, are accused of engaging in a conspiracy to kill Moïse and replace him as president, according to the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
Three of the men are American citizens and one, Ortiz, is a Colombian national and U.S. permanent resident of Miami, according to the office.
With the arrests, a total of 11 people face charges in the Southern District of Florida in connection with the assassination.
Moïse was killed after being shot 12 times at his home near the capital of Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021.
Ortiz and Intriago had financial stakes in a company called Counter Terrorist Unit Security (CTU), while Veintemilla, was involved with Worldwide Capital Lending Group, the federal prosecutor said. The men are accused of plotting to replace Moïse with Christian Emmanuel Sanon in order to gain lucrative contract deals with the government.
The federal prosector’s office alleges that Veintemilla agreed to help fund the coup d’etat through $175,000 line of credit to CTU. The co-conspirators would also be funded to buy ammunition in Haiti, the office said.
Ortiz and Intriago then allegedly hired 20 men through CTU to provide security to Sanon.
Bergmann had personal ties to Sanon and invested in the group, the prosecutor’s office said. He’s accused of falsifying export documentation for 20 CTU-branded ballistic vests going from South Florida to Haiti.
“By June 2021, the plan evolved as Ortiz, Intriago, Veintemilla and others apparently realized that Sanon had neither the constitutional qualifications nor the popular support of the Haitian people to become President,” the federal prosecutor’s office said Tuesday. “They shifted their support from Sanon to a former Haitian Supreme Court judge.”
Authorities have said that the original plan was to detain Moïse, force him onto a plane and whisk him to an unidentified location, but that plot crumbled when suspects couldn’t find a plane or sufficient weapons, according to court documents.
Ortiz, Intriago, Veintemilla are charged with one count each of conspiracy to provide material support and resources to carry out a kidnapping or killing resulting in death, providing material support and resources to a conspiracy to kidnap or kill resulting in death, and conspiracy to kill or kidnap a person.
Bergmann was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit export violations, submitting false and misleading export information, and smuggling ballistic vests from the United States to Haiti.
Tama Kudman, Veintemilla’s attorney, said his client would plead not guilty.
Ortiz, Intriago, and Bergmann are in federal custody and do not have attorneys listed for them in the court records. Sanon’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment.