a1685: Former Haiti military ruler released, rearrested (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Michael Deibert

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, April 15 (Reuters) - Prosper Avril, a former
military official who ruled Haiti from 1988 until 1990, was released from
prison on Monday after an appeals court found the government presented
insufficient evidence when it arrested him last year on a charge of
plotting against state security.
     But as Avril was leaving the National Penitentiary, a police SWAT team
rearrested him on new charges that he had orchestrated a 1990 massacre of
about a dozen peasant farmers in the village of Pyat, near the central city
of St. Marc.
     "We are very frustrated regarding this incident," said Avril's
attorney, Reynold Georges, who had been served with a paper outlining the
new charges against his client.
     "This is another step made by a lawless regime," said Avril's son,
Gregor, who had arrived at the prison to take his father home.
     Avril was arrested on May 26, 2001, on a charge of plotting against
the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Details of the alleged
plot were not made public and the appeals court ruled the arrest was based
on insufficient evidence.
     Government officials were unavailable for comment.
     Avril, 65, took power in a coup in 1988 and resigned the presidency in
1990.
     He was also being held on a warrant issued in 1996 accusing him of the
unlawful detention and torture during his presidential tenure of three
pro-democracy activists, Evans Paul, Marino Etienne and Serge Gilles.
     The three were arrested and severely beaten, allegedly on Avril's
orders, and then paraded, bloodied, on state television.
     The three were among the plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit filed against
Avril in U.S. District Court in Miami by a human rights group, the Center
for Constitutional Rights, in 1991.
     The Miami federal judge ruled in 1994 that Avril had overseen a
systematic policy of human rights abuse and torture while he was Haiti's
president and issued a $41 million judgment against him.
     Avril, who lived in Florida then, fled back to Haiti. He left Haiti a
second time following an attempt by authorities there to arrest him after
the still-unsolved assassination of a left-wing government official in
1995.
     The former general then dropped out of sight, reappearing in the
restaurants of the elegant Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville only days
before his 2001 arrest at a signing for a book he wrote blaming a wave of
violence on the Aristide government.