Colombian officials said their investigations into citizens’ involvement in the assassination are focused on Germán Alejandro Rivera, a retired sea captain who they believe was a primary point of contact for US-based recruiters.
Colombian consular officers still lack access to their detained citizens, forcing them to rely on information from the Haitian authorities, Colombian Deputy Foreign Minister Francisco Echeverri told reporters on Monday.
But according to reports in Colombian media citing the country’s intelligence officers, Mr Rivera told Haitian prosecutors that he was among a group of seven retired Colombian soldiers who entered the president’s residence on the night of the attack.
The reports don’t mention what role he or any other Colombian might have played in the assassination – but they add a layer of doubt to the already gritty story and raise questions about how privy some members of the Colombian group might have been to the unfolding conspiracy in the first hours of July 7th, leaving Mr Moïse dead and his wife injured, but no one was injured.
The secret is messed up by the frequent stops that the chief of Mr. Moofse’s palace guard of the president, Dimitri Hérard, made in the months leading up to the murder in Bogotá. Mr Hérard, who was trained in neighboring Ecuador, crossed the city six times this year on his way to other Latin American countries and spent at least two days in the Colombian capital at least once, the Colombian defense minister said in a news conference on Monday.
The recruitment of Colombians for the mission appears to have begun when Duberney Capador, a former soldier with 20 years of experience in the force, received a call in April from a security company asking him to assemble a group that included “key people in Haiti, â€said his sister Yenny Carolina Capador.
Mr Capador, 40, retired from the military in 2019 and lived with his mother on a family farm. He took the opportunity, said his sister.
