Lawyer seeks release of Haiti cop accused of police killing while protecting Blinken

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The lawyer for a jailed senior Haiti policeman accused of planning the assassination of a motorcycle driver with alleged gang ties is demanding his release from jail.

Mario Delcy filed the request to Investigative Judge Brunet Salomon on Monday on behalf of Haiti National Police officer Livenston Gauthier, the former head of the police substation in Tabarre, where the U.S. Embassy is located. Gauthier, 52, was arrested more than a month ago with a senior police inspector, Jean Claude Aimé, and two informants after Haiti’s judicial police accused them of carrying out an extrajudicial killing on the day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the country.

The police’s so-called evidence, when stacked against testimony from people named by Gauthier who can vouch for his alibi, doesn’t hold up, Delcy said in court documents. “After the questioning of all the people who had their names mentioned wrongly or rightly in this drama,” Delcy wrote, Gauthier “is still kept in detention for a crime he did not commit and that he could not not have committed because of his work and responsibilities on the day of this murder and the interviewees testified without a shadow of a doubt.”