Haiti extradites 18 suspects in Moïse assassination to U.S.

Eighteen suspects arrested in Haiti over the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse were flown to Florida on Sunday to face federal charges, moving one of Haiti's most consequential criminal cases into the U.S. court system.

Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said the defendants will face justice in Florida and that 30 people have been indicted in the United States over the killing. A military flight carried them from Port-au-Prince to Florida on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported.

An FBI and Homeland Security Investigations team transported the 18 defendants from Haiti to South Florida, according to the announcement published by the U.S. Attorney's Office. FBI Special Agent in Charge Brett Skiles said there were multiple arrests in the United States and abroad on Sunday. The defendants are set to stand trial in Florida for their alleged involvement in the plot.

Who was being held in Haiti

Quiñones did not identify the 18. Those who had remained jailed in Haiti while 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, the Associated Press reported.

Badio, considered a central suspect in the investigation, was arrested in Haiti in October 2023 after spending more than two years as a fugitive.

Defense attorneys in the United States for other suspects have asserted that Badio was the mastermind behind a plan to use the president's arrest to assassinate Moïse. He has not stood trial on the accusation, and the 18 flown to Florida are accused, not convicted. Authorities have said some of the suspects envisioned a coup rather than an assassination.

The Colombian soldiers have testified in Haiti that they were beaten, threatened with death and forced to sign documents in a language they do not understand.

Diana Marcela Arbeláez Llano, the wife of one of the suspects, said in a phone interview from Colombia on Sunday that the extradition caught her and the relatives of the other suspects by surprise. She said she hopes the men have the opportunity to prove their innocence. "We never imagined that the United States would have taken them so suddenly," she told the Associated Press.

Arbeláez said all the detained Colombians are very sick given the conditions in Haitian prisons, and that she hopes their health will improve in the United States, though she remains worried. "It's a state of total uncertainty," she said.

A case Haiti could not try

Haiti's Ministry of Justice and Public Security said in a statement that it surrendered the suspects "to allow for their trial." The government decided to strengthen its cooperation with American judicial authorities in order to bring the proceedings to a conclusion, the statement said. Proceedings inside Haiti continue to face serious difficulties, it added.

Justice officials in Haiti asked the United States and Canada for help in October 2025, after a local court of appeals ordered a new investigation into the killing. It was the third such inquiry since 2021.

The earlier investigations stalled because Haitian judges kept resigning from the case, fearing for their lives. Gangs seized control of the downtown Port-au-Prince courthouse where judges had been interrogating suspects.

Relatives of the Colombian suspects had complained for years about repeated delays in the Haitian judicial process after the arrests in 2021. The investigation was stalled by gang violence and by death threats inside a court system that was itself collapsing. Five years of Haitian proceedings produced no trial.

Convictions already won in Florida

A jury in Florida convicted four men in the killing on May 8: Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla and James Solages. All four had pleaded not guilty. The jury found them guilty of conspiring to kill or kidnap Haiti's elected leader and of providing material support for the plot. They are due to be sentenced in February.

At least five other defendants have pleaded guilty and are serving life sentences. Christian Sanon, a Haitian-American citizen whom authorities said was initially picked by the alleged conspirators to replace Moïse, is due to go on trial in Miami on September 28, eight days after the flight; the case had been delayed over his health. Once in power, the plan was for him to award contracts to a company known as CTU for infrastructure projects and military equipment.

Federal prosecutors have said the plot was primarily engineered and financed out of South Florida, which is why jurisdiction sits with the federal courts in the state closest to Haiti. A fair trial inside Haiti had also grown increasingly impossible amid the security collapse and the hollowing out of the judicial system, Al Jazeera reported.

The killing at Pelerin 5

Moïse, 53, was shot 12 times at his private residence in the Pelerin 5 neighborhood, in the hills above Port-au-Prince, on July 7, 2021. His wife, Martine Moïse, was critically injured in the attack, which took place overnight.

Five years without an election

The killing deepened Haiti's political instability and prompted investigations in both Haiti and the United States. It also left the country with no elected national leader. Haiti has held no national election since 2016, five years before the assassination, and a first round is now scheduled for December 13. Armed gangs expanded into the vacuum; the UN drugs office estimated in July 2025 that they controlled about 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, and UN figures this year are lower, at 80 to 85 percent.

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.

What prosecutors say comes next

The 18 are part of a group of 30 people indicted in the United States over the assassination, and Quiñones has said the investigation is continuing. He has not said which of the 30 were on Sunday's flight.

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.

The Associated Press reported that a Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. Skiles gave no figure for the other arrests made that day and did not say where they took place.

Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, called the transfer of the 18 suspects to the United States a "disgrace for the Haitian justice system," Al Jazeera reported. He urged an overhaul of the judicial system so that complicated cases can be tried inside Haiti in future.

The investigation is being directed by Quiñones, an appointee of President Donald Trump, whose office secured the May convictions in federal court in Florida.

The 18 have not been tried in the United States, and prosecutors did not say when they would first appear in federal court in South Florida. The FBI has said it is continuing to pursue people alleged to have been involved in the plot.