PORT-AU-PRINCE—The previous Colombian troopers jailed in Haiti within the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse say they didn’t kill him and thought they have been on a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration mission to arrest the chief, attorneys from the Colombian state, who talked to the lads, mentioned Friday.
“They mentioned they didn’t know what occurred,” mentioned Luis Andrés Fajardo, the No. 2 in Colombia’s human rights company. He spoke with many of the 18 males for about three hours at a Haitian jail. “It was a lure,” he recalled a number of saying.
The previous servicemen, ex-special operations troopers who’d fought guerrillas in Colombia, had been employed by a Miami safety firm and arrived right here between Might and June, in keeping with kin, textual content messages, and Haitians who interacted with them. However the proprietor of the corporate and a gaggle of Haitian businessmen, the police right here say, as an alternative took half in a plan to assassinate Mr. Moïse.
Within the conferences with the attorneys, wherein the servicemen for the primary time detailed their account for Colombia’s authorities, the previous troopers repeated the identical phrase over and once more: “We have been fooled.”
Even so, a number of the males didn’t communicate or spoke little, preferring to spend the time writing letters for Mr. Fajardo’s delegation to take again to their kin in Colombia. The boys had been tightly handcuffed for twenty-four hours a day for greater than every week, they mentioned, and about half of them have been cuffed to one another, Mr. Fajardo mentioned.