Ex-DEA informant sentenced to life in prison for 2021 killing of Haiti president

Joseph Vincent, a former informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), was handed a life sentence by a US court on Friday for his role in the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president.

A Haitian American national, Vincent admitted to helping plot to kill the Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in his home in Port-au-Prince, including advice about the political landscape and meetings with key community leaders.

Related: Colombian ex-army officer gets life in prison for killing of Haiti president Jovenel Moïse

Vincent is among 11 defendants in the case, which includes Colombian ex-soldiers and businessmen accused of helping supply funds and weapons and carrying out the night-time attack.

Another defendant, Frederick Joseph Bergmann Jr, pleaded guilty to a role in Moïse’s assassination on Friday. His sentencing was tentatively set for 18 April 2024.

The gunmen had reportedly masqueraded as DEA agents at the time of the attack, though the DEA later said Vincent and another Haitian American, James Solages, had not been acting on behalf of the agency.

The Haitian ambassador to Washington, Bocchit Edmond, said at the time that Moïse’s killers claimed to be members of the DEA as they entered his guarded residence.

“This was a well-orchestrated commando attack,” Edmond said not long after the killing. “They presented themselves as DEA agents, telling people they had come as part of a DEA operation.”

In videos circulating on social media, a man with an American accent was heard saying in English over a megaphone: “DEA operation. Everybody stand down. DEA operation. Everybody back up, stand down.”

Residents reported hearing gunshots and seeing men dressed in black running through the neighborhood.

Rodolphe Jaar, a Haitian Chilean businessman, was considered the mastermind of the assassination and was sentenced to life imprisonment by a federal court judge in Florida last summer.

Vincent is set to be held in a Florida prison, the court ruled.

Moïse’s widow, the first lady Martine Marie Étienne Moïse, was wounded during the attack on her husband but has since recovered. She said in 2021 that her husband’s murderers “came to kill his dream, his vision, his ideology” for the western hemisphere’s most impoverished nation.

Since the assassination, Haiti has descended into crisis, with violence from street gangs and vigilantes prevalent, and communities fighting back with bloody reprisals of their own.

Reuters contributed reporting