18 Accused in a President's Killing Are Bound for the U.S.

Eighteen suspects who had been jailed in Haiti over the July 2021 killing of President Jovenel Moïse were flown to Florida on Sunday aboard a military flight, moving the last large group of defendants out of Haiti's paralyzed courts and into American federal custody.

The suspects will face justice in Florida, according to Jason Reding Quiñones, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who said 30 people have been indicted in the assassination. Quiñones, an appointee of President Donald Trump, is directing the investigation.

"Today marks the next major phase in our pursuit of accountability for the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse," Quiñones wrote on X. "We will follow the evidence wherever it leads, to those who financed it, facilitated it, supported it or committed crimes to make it possible. Five years later, we are still bringing defendants before American courts, and we are not finished."

FBI Special Agent in Charge Brett Skiles said multiple arrests were made Sunday in the United States and abroad. The FBI and its partners "remain steadfast in ensuring that all individuals who allegedly sought profit from the assassination of a head of state are held fully accountable," Skiles said.

Who was still sitting in a Haitian jail

Quiñones did not identify the 18 people put on the plane. The group that had remained in Haiti awaiting trial included 17 Colombian former soldiers and Joseph Félix Badio, a former employee of Haiti's Ministry of Justice who worked in an anti-corruption unit.

Badio was arrested in Haiti in October 2023, after more than two years as a fugitive. Defense attorneys in the United States who represent other suspects have asserted that Badio was the mastermind of a plan to use the president's arrest as the opening move in killing him.

Authorities have said some of the men involved thought they were joining a coup, not an assassination. The Colombian soldiers testified in Haiti that they were beaten, threatened with death, and forced to sign documents written in a language they do not understand. Those claims have never been tested at a trial, because no trial ever started in Haiti.

Twelve bullets in the hills above Port-au-Prince

Moïse, 53, was shot 12 times at his private residence in the Pelerin 5 neighborhood, in the hills above the capital, during an overnight attack on July 7, 2021. His wife, Martine Moïse, was critically injured.

The killing left Haiti with no elected national leader and opened a political vacuum that has not closed. Armed gangs moved into the space fast, and by the time the suspects boarded Sunday's flight, the UN drugs office estimate most often cited, from July 2025, put their hold on Port-au-Prince at about 90 percent. UN figures this year are lower, at 80 to 85 percent.

A wife in Colombia learned about it after the fact

Diana Marcela Arbeláez Llano, the wife of one of the suspects, told The Associated Press in a phone interview Sunday from Colombia that the transfer caught her and the other families completely off guard.

"We never imagined that the United States would have taken them so suddenly," she said, adding that she hopes the men get a chance to prove their innocence. "I don't know why the United States would have taken them. It's a state of total uncertainty."

Relatives of the Colombian detainees had complained for years about the repeated delays in Haiti's process after the 2021 arrests, with the investigation stuck behind gang violence, death threats and a crumbling court system. Arbeláez said the detained Colombians are in poor condition after years in Haitian prisons, and that she remains worried about them even now that they are in American hands.

Why a Florida courtroom owns this case

Federal prosecutors say the plot to kill Moïse was primarily engineered, financed and staged out of South Florida, which is what gives U.S. courts in the state closest to Haiti jurisdiction over a crime committed roughly 700 miles away.

Two South Florida companies sit near the center of the American case. One is CTU, short for Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy and Counter Terrorist Unit Security. The other is Worldwide Capital Lending Group.

Arcángel Pretel Ortiz and Antonio Intriago were principals of CTU. Walter Veintemilla was a principal of Worldwide Capital Lending Group. All three were convicted in Florida on May 8, along with James Solages. Each of the four had pleaded not guilty.

Four convictions in May, five guilty pleas before that

The May jury found the four men guilty of conspiring to kill or kidnap Haiti's elected leader and of providing material support for the plot. All four face possible life imprisonment and are due to be sentenced in February.

At least five other defendants have pleaded guilty and are serving life sentences. Among them are a retired Colombian army officer and a Haitian-Chilean businessman who once worked as an informant for the U.S. government.

Christian Sanon, a Haitian-American citizen, is due to go on trial in Miami on September 28, eight days after the flight; the case had been delayed over his health. Authorities said the alleged conspirators initially picked Sanon to replace Moïse, and that once he was in power he was to award contracts to CTU for infrastructure projects, security forces and military equipment. That, prosecutors say, was the payday the plot was built around.

Haiti's own case never got to trial

Haitian judges assigned to the file kept resigning, saying they feared for their lives. Gangs seized control of the downtown Port-au-Prince courthouse where judges had been interrogating the suspects. Five years passed without a verdict, or a trial date.

In October 2025, Haitian justice officials asked the United States and Canada for help after a local court of appeals ordered yet another investigation into the killing, the third inquiry of its kind since the shooting.

Haiti's Ministry of Justice and Public Security said in a statement that it surrendered the suspects "to allow for their trial," and that the government decided to strengthen its cooperation with American judicial authorities in order to bring the proceedings to a conclusion. The ministry acknowledged that the case inside Haiti keeps running into serious obstacles.

A Haitian rights leader calls it a disgrace

Not everyone in Haiti read Sunday's flight as progress. Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network, said the transfer of the 18 suspects to the United States was a "disgrace for the Haitian justice system."

Esperance called for an overhaul of the judicial system so that complicated cases like this one can be tried inside Haiti in the future. The assassination of a sitting head of state is now being handled almost entirely by a foreign prosecutor's office, in a foreign language, in front of a foreign jury.

The palace security chief who walked out of prison

Authorities say key fugitives in the case remain at large, including Dimitri Hérard, the former head of security at Haiti's National Palace. Hérard escaped in early March 2024, when a powerful gang federation stormed Haiti's two biggest prisons and emptied them.

That single fact explains a lot about why Sunday's transfer happened. The country's prisons were breached, its judges were resigning, and its courthouse was occupied. Thirty people have been indicted in the United States, and prosecutors say the work is not finished.

Five years after the shooting

More than 5,900 people were killed in Haiti in 2025 and more than 2,700 injured, according to the UN Integrated Office in Haiti, which attributed about a third of the last quarter's casualties to gangs and most of the rest to law-enforcement operations. About 1.5 million Haitians are displaced inside their own country, a record the International Organization for Migration reported in June. Those numbers are the backdrop to every decision in this case, including the choice to put 18 defendants on a military plane instead of in a Haitian dock.

For the families of the Colombian soldiers, the immediate question is simpler than any of that. They spent five years demanding a trial in a system that could not deliver one, and then the men vanished from Port-au-Prince without warning. What comes next will play out in an American federal courtroom, where the U.S. attorney has already told the public he intends to keep adding defendants.