Four men were arrested Tuesday in Florida 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 Southern Florida.
Three of the men are U.S. citizens and one, Ortiz, is a Colombian national and U.S. permanent resident of Miami, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
With the arrests, a total of 11 people face charges in the Southern District of Florida in connection with the assassination.
Moïse died after he was shot 12 times at his home near the capital, 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, federal prosecutors said. The men are accused of plotting to replace Moïse with Christian Emmanuel Sanon to gain lucrative contract deals with the government.
The federal prosecutor’s office alleges that Veintemilla agreed to help fund the coup d’état through a $175,000 line of credit to CTU. The co-conspirators would also be funded to buy ammunition in Haiti, said the office, which alleged that Ortiz and Intriago then 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 is 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…
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