Haitian doctor with Florida connections arrested as a leader in Moïse assassination plot

A Haitian doctor who has been a fixture in Florida for more than two decades has been arrested in Haiti under suspicion that he was one of the leaders behind the middle-of-the-night assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last week, Haiti’s police chief said Sunday.

Christian Emmanuel Sanon’s name was mentioned by several of the people who are in custody in the case, Haiti National Police Chief Léon Charles said. Sanon was the first person one of the suspects called after being captured. The Haiti National Police arrested him as part of their ongoing investigation into the leadership of the group of 26 Colombians and two Haitian Americans suspected of carrying out the assassination.

Sanon “made contact with two other people who are implicated, they know who they are, and are recognized as intellectual authors of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse’,” Charles said.

Sanon’s arrest makes him the third person of Haitian descent who has been arrested in the killing. James Solages, 35, and Joseph G. Vincent, 55, Haitian Americans from South Florida, are also in police custody after turning themselves in hours after the killing.

The two Haitian Americans, who are now among 21 suspects in police custody, told Haitian officials during questioning that their mission was not to kill the president but to serve a 2019 arrest warrant that had been issued by a judge and to take Moïse to the presidential palace. There, they would install Sanon, 63, as president, a source who spoke with the two men told the Herald.

On Saturday, Charles had alluded to Sanon in a Miami Herald interview, though he did not name him. He said that the suspects, including the two Haitian Americans, confirmed that they worked for a company “based in the U.S. and Colombia.... [which] worked with the two Haitian Americans and a high-profile doctor here.”

The company is Miami-based CTU Security, registered in Florida as the Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy LLC.

“I would say that the Haitian [doctor] recruited CTU and CTU recruited the Colombians. That’s the pattern,” Charles said.

Sanon’s arrest comes as Haitian police, working with Colombian law enforcement, try to piece together the events leading to the death of Moïse, who was shot 12 times in the upstairs bedroom of his home around 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Among the unanswered questions: How Sanon, who once filed for bankruptcy, could be behind a costly conspiracy. Some of the people arrested said that they were paid $3,000 a month and had been living in Haiti since January.

During a press conference late Sunday, Charles said police have two ongoing investigations: one into the death of the president and the perpetrators, the other an administrative probe being handled by police internal affairs.

Questions have been raised about Moïse’s presidential guards and how the assailants were able to break into his residence and get past the guard gate and two dogs. Police sources have told the Herald that four members of the presidential security detail, including the head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace, Dimitri Hérard, have been removed from their leadership duties and must report daily to internal affairs. They have also been requested for questioning. Hérard is currently the subject of a US law enforcement investigation into arms trafficking in Haiti, the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy and Research reported this week.

Meanwhile, five Colombian former soldiers suspected of having been involved in the attack on the president’s home remain at large, while 18 others are now in custody.

Sanon arrived in Haiti in June on board a private plane with “political motivations,” Charles said, and recruited the suspects to provide him security as the new president of Haiti. According to interviews with the Colombian suspect, the group was initially recruited to provide Sanon security as a VIP, but the mission changed and they were told to serve an arrest warrant on Moïse. Charles did not address when or how the plan changed to kill Moïse.

At some point 22 other people landed in Haiti to join the first group already in the country.

Among the items police found at Sanon’s home after his arrest was a cache of arms and ammunition including six rifles, 9mm guns, 20 cartridges of bullets and four Dominican Republic license plates, Charles said.

Sanon has been living on and off in Florida for more than 20 years, from the Tampa Bay area to South Florida. Public records show that he has had more than a dozen businesses registered in the state, but most of them are inactive. They ranged from medical services to an energy company to real estate.

While he refers to himself as a doctor, records show no medical license in Florida, where he filed a federal bankruptcy case in Tampa in 2013. Court records refer to him as a doctor who works in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A YouTube video championing his work says he studied medicine in the Dominican Republic.

In his bankruptcy filing, Sanon also listed himself as church pastor at the Tabarre Evangelical Tabernacle, as president of a non-government organization called Organization Rome Haiti, and as president of Radio-Tele Vasco — all in Tabarre, Haiti.

Sanon had a home in Brandon, near Tampa, which he lost in a foreclosure before filing for bankruptcy. At the time, he said he had more than $140,000 in equity in the home. According to bankruptcy records, he was making an annual salary of $60,000 and had debts totaling more than $400,000. During the bankruptcy, Sanon switched his address from Brandon to Hollywood, then to Boynton Beach.

Other court records show that Sanon had been living in Margate, in Broward County, as far back as 1998, when he got a ticket for a traffic violation.

A video shared on YouTube describes Sanon as one of the leaders needed to represent the Haitian people, and that he has the support of more than 200 companies to foster the industrial development and socio-economic recovery of Haiti.

According to the video, Sanon was born in Jacmel in 1956 and studied biology in New York before studying in the Dominican Republic.

Miami Herald reporter Daniel Chang and McClatchy Washington Bureau reporter Kevin G. Hall contributed to this report.