HAITIAN authorities declared a state of emergency on Sunday and ordered a curfew in an attempt to regain civic control after an explosion of violence during the weekend.
The lockdown began on Sunday night after gunmen from gangs overran the country’s two biggest prisons and freed their inmates.
The government said the state of emergency would enable authorities to find escaped killers, kidnappers and other violent criminals.
Finance Minister Patrick Boivert, acting prime minister while the unelected premier Ariel Henry is reportedly away in Kenya, said: “The police were ordered to use all legal means at their disposal to enforce the curfew and apprehend all offenders.”
Mr Henry is believed to be still in Nairobi to salvage support for a Kenyan-led and United States-sponsored armed force to help stabilise Haiti in its conflict with the powerful crime groups, but his exact whereabouts have not been confirmed.
At least nine people have been killed since Thursday — four of them police officers — as gangs stepped up co-ordinated attacks on state institutions in Port-au-Prince, including the country’s international airport.
But late Saturday’s attack on the National Penitentiary was a big shock to Haitians, accustomed though they are to living under the constant threat of violence.
Almost all of the estimated 4,000 inmates escaped, leaving the normally overcrowded prison empty with no guards in sight and clothing and furniture strewn across the concrete patio.
Three bodies with gunshot wounds lay at the prison entrance.
In another neighbourhood, the bloodied corpses of two men with their hands tied behind their backs lay face down as residents walked past roadblocks set up with burning tyres.
Among the few dozen that chose to stay in the prison are 18 former Colombian soldiers accused of working as mercenaries in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise.
One of the men, Francisco Uribe, said in the video message widely shared on social media: “They are massacring people indiscriminately inside the cells.”
“I didn’t flee because I’m innocent,” he told journalists who walked into the normally highly guarded facility.
A second Port-au-Prince prison containing around 1,400 inmates was also overrun.
Mr Henry was appointed as prime minister following president Moise’s assassination and has repeatedly postponed plans to hold parliamentary and presidential elections, which haven’t happened in almost a decade.
