Federal prosecutors on Wednesday presented several high-powered rifles tied to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, along with a ballistics expert who testified that high-velocity bullets he tested were fired from one of the guns.

“These three ammunition components were all identified as having been fired from the same barrel,” Theodore Chavez, an FBI ballistics expert, testified when asked if he was able to reach a conclusion after his tests. The weapon was identified as a Palmetto Armory rifle.

Chavez tested eight guns. All but one he examined were “operational and fired as designed” when he performed tests at an FBI lab, he said in Miami federal court. The weapons, displayed at the prosecutors’ table, were a combination of shotguns, rifles and submachine guns — among them an Uzi, a Remington shotgun with a rainbow-colored sling, the AR-15 type Palmetto rifle and an Israeli-made Galil rifle etched with the words “Police Nationale d’Haiti.”

One of the guns, a 12-gauge Luigi Franchi shotgun, had been presumably tagged by Haitian police, with the name of John Joel Joseph, a former senator who has pleaded guilty in the case. He is among five defendants who have pleaded guilty to the main conspiracy charge and were sentenced to life in prison. A sixth defendant pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of smuggling ballistic vests to the Colombian commandos prosecutors say were hired by Doral-based Counter Terrorist Unit Security to kill the Haitian president.

Moïse was assassinated on July 7, 2021, inside the bedroom of his hilltop home overlooking Port-au-Prince. Two bullets and two bullet fragments were extracted from his body, Haiti’s chief pathologist has testified. But defense attorneys challenged him about what they described as an incomplete autopsy, saying Moise suffered a dozen bullet wounds, including a shot to his heart and another to his head. Those bullets were not extracted by the pathologist, according to x-rays of his body.

In the aftermath of the killing, more than a dozen former Colombian soldiers, three Haitian Americans and dozens of members of the Haiti National Police were arrested in Port-au-Prince. Some of the officers were part of Moïse’s presidential security detail, while others are accused of accompanying the group of Colombian commandos to his home in the middle of the night.

Lawyers for four South Florida men accused by federal prosecutors of conspiring to kill the president argue that the Colombian team was only providing support to arrest Moïse, and that presidential security guards and national police officers had killed him before the Colombians showed up at his home.

Standing trial in Miami are Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, 53, a former FBI informant, Colombian national and U.S. permanent resident; Antonio Intriago, 62, the Venezuelan-American owner of a Doral security company that hired Pretel; James Solages, 40, a Haitian-American handyman who also worked for Intriago, and Walter Veintemilla, 57, an Ecuadorian American that prosecutors say helped finance the plan targeting Moïse.

A fifth defendant, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haiti-born doctor who prosecutors say wanted to be named president after Moïsee was killed, will be tried at a later date due to health issues.

Prosecutors are accusing the men on trial of hiring 20-plus Colombian commandos to kill the president so that they could obtain Haitian government contracts from his successor. As part of the murder-conspiracy trial, prosecutors have introduced the former soldiers’ service records and travel documents showing that they arrived in Haiti after flying from Bogotá to Punta Cana in the neighboring Dominican Republic on June 4, 2021. The group then traveled to Haiti by bus across the border.

Vests, body armor

Prosecutors presented no evidence that the Colombians or Haitian Americans smuggled guns into Haiti. Still, the weapons were introduced as part of the government’s exhibits and shown to jurors along with body armor and a camouflage ballistic vest with a Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy patch.

The weapons displayed were among “many” firearms, Homeland Security Investigations special agent Richard Maniara testified, that were seized by Haitian national police after the slaying.

Though Maniara took more than 400 photographs, only a handful were submitted by prosecutor into evidence. The weapons confiscated in Haiti weren’t turned over to the FBI lab until May 2023, more than a year and a half after the assassination, defense attorneys said during the questioning of a witness.

As in previous days, the defense focused on gaps in the chain of custody, the lack of fingerprinting or DNA that an FBI evidence-gathering team failed to retrieve after they landed in Haiti six days after the killing, the length of time it took for the evidence to arrive in the U.S. and the conditions in which they were sent.

The bullets and bullet fragments Chavez examined, for example, were placed in an unsealed zip lock bag and the semi-automatic, Palmetto State Armory rifle he identified as firing the bullets was in unsealed packaging inside a sealed container.

“Can you account for that weapon for 18 months?” Simon Patrick Dray, one of the attorneys for Solages asked Chavez. The FBI ballistics expert replied, “I have no knowledge where that firearm was prior to its receipt at the laboratory.”

Government witnesses

The government’s other witnesses included a member of the FBI’s Emergency Response Team who sketched the inside of the two-story house Moïse and his wife were renting. FBI Special Agent Rene Luna, who testified there were no time constraints as they searched the crime scene, also questioned several of the former Colombian soldiers detained in Haiti.

Luna has a master’s in forensic science but said he never worked in the field. Still, it didn’t stop defense lawyers from grilling him on the lack of forensic evidence in the case, including fingerprints and DNA.

“We knew that at least from the preliminary intel that we had... Colombian nationals were in there,” he said..

Federal prosecutor Jason Wu asked if fingerprinting a house in the investigation of a violent crime investigation is “typical or very a typical or unusual?”

“It’s a typical,” Luna replied.

Wu then asked Luna if he had ever executed an arrest warrant and brought private citizens along with him, including having them accompany him to a foreign country. The defendants have said they were helping to execute a Haitian judge’s arrest warrant against Moïse, who in the final months of his presidential term was the subject of anti-government protests and accusations he had overstayed his term in office.

“Do you have friends outside the bureau who own guns?” Wu asked. After Luna said yes, the prosecutor asked if he had ever “invited them to come along on an arrest with you.”

“No,” Luna said.

FBI visits

The government ended with FBI agent Jacqueline Valdes on the stand. Valdes traveled to Kingston, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic in October 2021 and January 2022 to interview two suspects who had escaped after the killing.

Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios, the first to be indicted by U.S. authorities, was found in Jamaica after his former commanding officer in the Colombian military contacted the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá. The other suspect, Rodolphe “Dodof” Jaar, fled across the border to the Dominican Republic. Jaar, a convicted Haitian drug trafficker and former DEA informant at the time he got involved in the plot, is accused of playing a key role in providing housing, weapons and other support to the Colombian commandos.

After making contact with Palacios, Valdes said she flew to Jamaica to interview Palacios, who had retired as a second lieutenant after spending more than 20 years in the military. Like his fellow squad members, Palacios arrived in Haiti after first traveling to Punta Cana from Bogotá and had a return ticket for July 3, 2021.

Valdes testified that she found Palacios had $2,060 in cash in a backpack, along with Jamaican, Mexican and Colombian currency. He also had a necklace and watch that belonged to Moïse’s widow, Martine Moïse, who testified last week that a watch given to her husband by an outgoing ambassador to Haiti was among the stolen items the night of the assassination.

Valdes identified the watch among the items U.S. law enforcement seized from Palacios, along with two cell phones.

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