PONT-SONDÉ, Haiti (AP) — Angry whispers have broken the heavy silence that fell over Pont-Sondé just days after a vicious gang attack left more than 70 dead, marking one of Haiti’s biggest massacres in recent history.
The whispering came from a handful of people that remained in the small town in central Haiti after Thursday's assault. They huddled by the roadside, stood under leafy trees or milled around the lone cemetery.
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A cemetery worker prepares a grave days after a deadly gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
A local resident points to a bullet hole on a door days after a deadly gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
Morgue workers move an empty coffin in Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, days after a deadly gang attack on the town. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
People ride public transportation known as a tap-tap in Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, days after a deadly gang attack on the town. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
Local Frantz Baptist shows bullet casings he collected from the streets near his home days after an armed gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
All of them blamed the government for the assault by the Gran Grif gang, created after a former legislator armed young men nearly a decade ago to secure his election and control of the area.
“I have to thank the government, because the gangs are killing people and kids cannot go to school,” said Lunoir Jean Chavanne, the town’s morgue driver.
He lost three relatives, including a 14-year-old boy and a beloved uncle who was a priest of the Vodou religion.
Like others, Chavanne questioned why authorities didn’t do anything to stop the attack by Gran Grif, considered one of Haiti’s cruelest gangs.
“They’ve been announcing that they were coming a number of times on social media,” he said.
Pont-Sondé was once a bustling community with a thriving marketplace located near the mighty Artibonite River, Haiti’s longest.
It’s the same river that gang members used to their advantage the night of the attack, plying its rich brown waters with canoes so as not to alert anyone about their presence.
They killed babies, older people and entire families.
Among the victims was the nephew of 58-year-old Elvens François, who was preparing to bury him on Tuesday.
He recalled how he was carrying a plastic bag with his belongings as he prepared to flee his house when three men gripping automatic weapons surrounded him. One held François from the back while the other two gang members faced him.
“They attacked me, cornered me and took everything from me,” he said, tears in his eyes.
He doesn’t know why he was spared.
François’ nephew will be buried near a mass grave at Pont-Sondé’s lone cemetery, where an 83-year-old caretaker serves as the lone witness to most burials since the attack, with the relatives of victims either dead or having joined the more than 6,200 people who fled to the nearby coastal city of Saint-Marc for safety.
On Tuesday, the caretaker pointed to the recent graves he dug, noting none of their relatives were able to attend the burials.
They are the most recent victims of a surge of gang violence to hit the Artibonite region in recent years, although the magnitude of Thursday’s attack shocked many.
“This is the most terrifying massacre in decades in Haiti,” said Romain Le Cour, senior expert on Haiti for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “It’s definitely a show of force.”
Such massacres were limited to the capital of Port-au-Prince, of which 80% is controlled by gangs and is now being patrolled by Kenyan police leading a U.N.-backed mission struggling with a lack of funds and personnel.
The attack poses additional challenges to authorities already struggling with gang violence in the capital, Le Cour said.
“It’s a very, very tragic message and challenge sent to the authorities and the international community,” he said.
Gone is the chatter of street vendors and the rumbling of small, colorful buses known as tap-taps crowded with passengers.
The only noises now are the angry whispering, the shovel hitting the dirt at the cemetery and the occasional motorcycle carrying a coffin.
The handful of people who stayed behind now carry machetes, walking past walls pocked with bullet holes and floors smeared with blood.
“Young men in the area were fighting back,” Chavanne said, referring to a local self-defense group known as “The Coalition” that was trying to keep the Gran Grif gang at bay. “This is how we were able to resist.”
But it was those very efforts that sparked the attack, according to Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network.
The human rights group said in a report that Gran Grif was angry that the self-defense group was trying to limit gang activity and prevent it from profiting off a makeshift road toll it had recently established nearby.
“The night that they invaded, there was nothing that they were able to do,” Chavanne said of the self-defense group.
The leader of Gran Grif, Luckson Elan, was recently sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council and the U.S. government. Also sanctioned was Prophane Victor, the former legislator that the U.N. accused of arming young men in the Artibonite region.
Chavanne and others questioned what police plan to do now.
“Four days later, the gang is still threatening people on social media, saying that they’re coming back to finish them,” he said. “And now, I’m left with nothing in my hands, just dead family members.”
Dánica Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Evens Sanon contributed to this report from Port-au-Prince.
A cemetery worker prepares a grave days after a deadly gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
A local resident points to a bullet hole on a door days after a deadly gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
Morgue workers move an empty coffin in Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, days after a deadly gang attack on the town. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
People ride public transportation known as a tap-tap in Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, days after a deadly gang attack on the town. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
Local Frantz Baptist shows bullet casings he collected from the streets near his home days after an armed gang attack on Pont-Sonde, Haiti, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Vladimir Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic, Bob Woodward reported in his new book, “War."
The revelations were made in the famed Watergate reporter's latest book, which also details President Joe Biden's frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman 's assortment of burner phones. The Associated Press obtained an early copy of the book, which is due out next week.
Steven Cheung, Trump's communications director, denied the accounts in the book. “None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in a statement.
Trump had previously spoken to Woodward for the journalist's 2021 book, “Rage.” Trump later sued over it, claiming Woodward never had permission to publicly release recordings of their interviews for the book. The publisher and Woodward denied his allegations.
Here is more from the book:
Woodward reports that Trump asked an aide to leave his office at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, so that the former president could have a private call with Putin in early 2024. The aide, whom Woodward doesn’t name, said there have been multiple calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left office, perhaps as many as seven, according to the book.
Trump's relationship with Putin has been scrutinized since his 2016 campaign for president, when he memorably called on Russia to find and make public missing emails deleted by Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.
U.S. intelligence agencies later determined that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump, though an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy between the Trump team and Russia. In 2018, Trump publicly questioned that finding following an in-person meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
In recent years, Trump has criticized U.S. support for Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion. He has said Ukraine should have made concessions to Putin before Russia invaded in 2022. He also previously touted his good relationship with Putin and called the Russian leader “pretty smart” for invading Ukraine.
Woodward reports that Trump sent Putin COVID-19 test machines for his personal use as the virus began spreading in 2020.
Putin told Trump not to tell anyone because people would be mad at Trump over it, but Trump said he didn’t care if anyone knew, according to the book. Trump ended up agreeing not to tell anyone.
The book doesn’t specify when the machines were sent but describes it as being when the virus spread rapidly through Russia. It was previously reported by The Associated Press and other agencies that Trump’s administration in May 2020 sent ventilators and other equipment to several countries, including Russia.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview Tuesday with radio host Howard Stern, accused Trump of giving the machines to a “murderous dictator” at a time when “everyone was scrambling" to get tests.
“This person who wants to be president again, who secretly is helping out an an adversary while the American people are dying by the hundreds every day," said Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate.
The book also details Biden’s complicated relationship with Netanyahu as well as private moments when the president has been fed up with him over the Israel-Hamas war.
Biden’s “frustrations and distrust” of Netanyahu “erupted” this past spring, Woodward writes. The president privately unleashed a profanity-laden tirade, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “bad f——— guy," according to the book. Biden said he felt, in Woodward’s accounting, that Netanyahu “had been lying to him regularly.” With Netanyahu “continuing to say he was going to kill every last member of Hamas.” Woodward wrote, “Biden had told him that was impossible, threatening both privately and publicly to withhold offensive U.S. weapons shipment.”
Biden and Netanyahu have long been acquainted, although their relationship has not been known to be close or overly friendly. Last week, Biden said he didn’t know whether the Israeli leader was holding up a Mideast peace deal in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Asked about the book's reporting, White House spokesperson Emilie Simons told reporters Tuesday that “The commitment that we have to the state of Israel is ironclad.”
Simons, when pressed on the details, said she wouldn't comment on every anecdote that may come out in reporting. She added of Biden and Netanyahu: “They have a long-term relationship. They have a very honest and direct relationship, and I don’t have a comment on those specific anecdotes.”
The book details Biden’s criticism late last year of President Barack Obama’s handling of Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, when Biden was serving as the Democrat’s vice president.
“They f----- up in 2014,” Biden said to a close friend in December, blaming the lack of action for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Woodward wrote. “Barack never took Putin seriously.”
One of Trump’s longest-term allies, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, blamed Trump’s ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was rigged to a cult of personality in which the former president’s ensconcement at Mar-a-Lago and circle of aides and advisers “constantly feed this narrative,” according to the book.
The weekend after Russia invaded Ukraine, Graham was with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which the senator characterized as “a little bit like going to North Korea.” Graham added that “everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”
On politics, Woodward wrote that Graham’s counsel was part of what persuaded Trump to run again for the presidency.
In March, during one of his many visits to the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Graham told Woodward that he had been meeting with the Saudi crown prince when Graham suggested they call Trump. From “a bag containing about 50 burner phones,” Prince Mohammed “pulled out one labeled ‘TRUMP 45.’” On another trip, Woodward wrote, the Saudi leader retrieved another burner phone, "this time labeled JAKE SULLIVAN ” when the men called Biden’s national security adviser.
Price reported from New York. Associated Press writers Hillel Italie in New York, Eric Tucker in Washington and Aamer Madhani aboard Air Force One contributed to this report.
FILE - In this April 29, 2017, file photo journalist Bob Woodward sits at the head table during the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an extended meeting during the summit of the heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool Photo via AP)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at an event marking one year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Miami. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
