Former Director of Les Cayes Prison Taken Into Custody For Prison Killings

By DEBORAH SONTAG

Sylvestre Larack, former director of the prison in Les Cayes, Haiti arrested as of Friday evening.

The former director of the prison in Les Cayes, where a dozen or more inmates were shot dead on Jan. 19, was taken into custody by the judicial police in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, according to a United Nations official. It did not appear that the former director, Sylvestre Larack, was under arrest as of Friday evening, but he remained in isolation at the judicial police headquarters and he was not free to leave, the official said. After the inmate deaths in Les Cayes, Mr. Larack had been promoted to run the country’s largest prison, the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. Last Sunday, The New York Times published a report on the killings at Les Cayes, indicating that the authorities had shot unarmed detainees and then sought to cover it up. This provoked the Haitian president, René Préval, to establish a joint Haitian-United Nations commission of inquiry, and Mr. Larack, who was found last month to have lied to police investigators about the killings, is being questioned once again.

Source: NYTimes