a1511: Reuters: US Deports Haitian Ex-cop (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Ex-cop deported from U.S., jailed in his native Haiti

By Michael Deibert
Reuters
Posted March 27 2002, 5:11 PM EST

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - A high-ranking police official
under the military junta that ruled Haiti in the early
1990s was deported from the United States and jailed in
connection with the 1993 assassination of Haiti's justice
minister, police said Wednesday.

Jackson Joanis, already convicted in absentia in Haiti for
another murder, was expelled from the United States Monday
and arrested along with several other criminal deportees
when he arrived in Port-au-Prince that day, Haitian
National Police spokesman Jean Dady Simeon said.

``Joanis is being held at the National Penitentiary for the
involvement in the murder of Justice Minister Guy Malary on
October 14, 1993,'' Simeon said.

Joanis was an army captain and police station chief who
directed an anti-gang unit under the military regime that
toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in
1991.

Joanis has been wanted by Haitian authorities for years for
his alleged role in the murder of Malary, Aristide's
justice minister during his first administration.

Malary was gunned down in the capital one day after the
United States and United Nations reimposed sanctions on the
junta government, which had prevented the USS Harlan County
from docking in Haiti to begin a U.S.-led peacekeeping
mission.

Joanis entered the United States in 1994 on a tourist visa
and sought political asylum after the coup regime was
forced out and a U.S.-led multinational force restored to
power the democratically elected Aristide.

In 1995, Joanis was convicted in absentia in Haiti in the
1993 murder of businessman Antoine Izmery, an ardent
Aristide supporter who had spoken out against the coup
plotters. Izmery was dragged out of Mass at the Sacred
Heart Church in Port-au-Prince and shot and killed.

The murder conviction made Joanis ineligible for residency
in the United States, which ordered him deported. Joanis,
who was sentenced to hard labor for life on the Izmery
conviction, unsuccessfully challenged the deportation
order, arguing that he faced torture if returned to Haiti.

The presence of Haiti's former paramilitary leaders in the
United States has long been a thorny subject in relations
between the two countries.

Emmanuel ``Toto'' Constant, former leader of the FRAPH
paramilitary group that human rights groups have linked to
thousands of murders during the military government, lives
in Queens, New York, and has resisted all efforts to deport
him.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards®
http://movies.yahoo.com/