Martine Moise, the former first Lady of Haiti was the only person who witnessed the gruesome assassination of her husband in his bedroom last month.
Martine was found bleeding on the floor next to the body of her husband, Jovenel Moise, on July 7. But she survived the mysterious attack and has now launched a manhunt to bring the killers to justice.
In an interview in South Florida on Sunday, Mrs. Moise still clad in mourning apparel with her arm bandaged from wrist to shoulder narrated the bloodcurdling events of the attack to sources and demanded the global help in solving the murder.
“Someone gave the order, and someone paid the money. Those are the people that we are searching for. I want the United Nations Security Council’s help to find those people,” she said.
Mrs. Moise is the only eyewitness to her husband’s assassination and is also the only other known victim, her elbow and forearm shattered with a barrage of bullets as attackers entered the presidential suite.
She said she got to know something was wrong that night when she and her husband heard automatic gunfire outside their home around 1 am. So as soon as they realized that gunmen had entered the house, they tried to hide on the floor behind their bed.
Meanwhile, Moise did not believe what was about to happen.
“At that time, I didn’t even think that they were going to be able to get into the room where we were, because we had about 30 or 50 security guards in the house,” she said.
She estimated that about a dozen men entered the room, speaking Spanish, looking for something specific. “They came to the room to find something, because I heard them saying, ”No es eso, no es eso, eso es” which in Spanish means, ”That’s not it, that’s not it — that’s it”. Which means they found what they were looking for.”
She recalled with grief that, that was when they turned their attention to the president on the floor and made a fatal phone call.
“He was alive at the time. They said he was tall, skinny and Black, and maybe the person on the phone confirmed to the shooter that was him. Then they shot him on the floor.”
” Once they shot the president, that’s when I thought, ‘It’s over for both of us.’ And I closed my eyes, you know, I didn’t think about anything else. I thought, ‘It’s over. This our last day,'” she said.
But the attackers left without further bloodshed.
Moise believed they thought she had died too.
The massive security at the palace failed in rendering their duty and Haitian authorities have still not explained why. At least two top security chiefs are currently in prison, including presidential security chief Dimitri Herard and coordinator of the palace security Jean Laguel Civil.
Even after the attack, the security guards charged with protecting Haiti’s first family never came. It was a maid who later found Mrs. Moise in the blood-filled bedroom.
From where she was lying on the ground with her arm broken and bleeding in multiple places, Moise says she could see only the gunmen’s shoes.
According to an initial report by investigators, her husband was shot 12 times, with bullet holes found in his face, torso, legs and arms.
She went on to say that whilst she was leaving the house early morning after the murder, she noticed that usual security guards stationed on the compound were absent and normally, the guards wouldn’t leave without an order. So they may they received an order to leave and this has got her thinking a lot.
“It would have been 50 against 28, we had more security than them… I believe the president died with the hope that his security team would come,” she said.
