Diplomat shot dead in Haiti

01/06/2005 - 17:29:49
Gunmen killed the honorary French consul to the northern city of Cap-Haitien while he was driving in Haiti’s capital, amid growing insecurity in the hemisphere’s poorest country, the French Embassy said today.

Paul-Henri Mourral was driving yesterday on Haiti’s main north-south highway connecting Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien when a group of armed men shot him, pulled him out of his vehicle and stole it, said Eric Bosc, a French Embassy spokesman.

A few minutes later, an International Committee of the Red Cross ambulance rushed Mourral to a hospital, Bosc said. Doctors operated on him, removing some of the bullets and giving him blood transfusions, but he died late last night.

“He was critically wounded when he arrived at the hospital,” Bosc said. “We are still not sure how many bullets hit him. There were many.”

Mourral, 53, represented the commercial interests of the French community in Cap-Haitien, Bosc said. Mourral was born in Paris but had lived many years in Haiti. He was married to a Haitian woman and had two children who are university students in France.

It wasn’t clear if Mourral’s body would be repatriated to France, Bosc said.

France asked the Haitian government to “put everything in place to identify and judge the authors of this assassination,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said in a statement today.

Bosc said embassy officials didn’t have a motive for the attack. Haitian police and government officials did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment.

The shooting came less than a week after the US government issued a travel warning to American citizens and ordered the departure of non-essential embassy employees and their relatives.

“Visitors and residents must remain vigilant due to the absence of an effective police force … and the possibility of random violent crime including kidnapping, carjacking and assault,” the warning says.

The French government issued a travel warning earlier this week to tourists and businessmen, citing an upsurge of carjackings and kidnappings, said Bosc, but did not order families from the French diplomatic corps to leave the country.

One day before the US travel warning, gunmen opened fire on a US Embassy vehicle in the capital, but the US government said the incident did not prompt the warning and that it was issued because of the deteriorating security situation in the Caribbean country of 8 million.

Haitian police and a 7,400-member UN peacekeeping force have struggled to control violence since the February 2004 rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Human rights group estimate more than 700 people have been killed – including 40 police officers – in Port-au-Prince since September when Aristide loyalists called for increased protests to demand his return from exile in South Africa.

Yesterday, a fire ripped through a popular market in downtown Port-au-Prince a few minutes after armed men opened fire. At least one person was shot and killed, but witnesses and survivors said they believed many more people were trapped inside.

UN peacekeepers cordoned off the area late yesterday and helped people evacuate while Haitian fire trucks sprayed water on the blaze. But despite repeated requests, UN officials said today they were not able to provide estimates of dead or wounded.