Haiti police kill suspected Jamaican traffickers during historic cocaine bust

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Three Jamaicans are dead and a Bahamian national is in custody in Haiti after a historic drug bust Sunday off the country’s northwest coast led to the seizure of more than 1,000 kilos of cocaine worth tens of millions of dollars in the United States.

Haitian authorities said the men were killed during a joint police operation that triggered a firefight on the high seas.

“There were two people who died at sea in an exchange of gunfire, and there was another who did not die on the spot but died later,” Jeir Pierre, the government prosecutor for Port-de-Paix, confirmed to the Miami Herald. Pierre said the three dead were Jamaicans, while a fourth suspected drug trafficker who was shot and transferred to a hospital is a native of The Bahamas.

Pierre did not have the names of the suspects but Haitian police identified one of the deceased as Jimmy Antony. The incident unfolded near the island of ‘île de la Tortue on Haiti’s northwest after police spotted two boats in Haitian waters.

While one of the boats managed to escape, a blue-and-white boat with three engines was intercepted. It had 40 packages of powder that tested positive for cocaine. Police said the boat carried 1,045 kilos of the drug, which has a street value of $32 million in the U.S.

The drugs are believed to have been destined for the Dominican Republic, a popular transit route for cocaine bound for the U.S. and Europe.

The seizure is a major victory for Haitian authorities, who last saw a haul of that magnitude in 2015, when the Panamanian-flagged MV Manzanares, dubbed the “sugar boat,” transported between 700 to 800 kilos of cocaine and 300 kilos of heroin, with an estimated U.S. street value of $100 million, into Port-au-Prince.