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One US official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that some of the rebel forces supported their activity through drug trafficking. ''That's how they staged the operation. They were more drug traffickers than they were rebels," the official said.

To his supporters, Chamblain is a hero, a man who risked his life to help remove the Aristide government, which increasingly had come under allegations of corruption. To his detractors, Chamblain is a vicious assassin. For Haiti, he is a test of a weak and decrepit justice system and a challenge to a fragile peace that sometimes appears held together with duct tape.

''There are strong indications that Haiti doesn't have a justice system," said Robert Fatton, a political science professor and specialist on Haiti at the University of Virginia. ''And Chamblain is the most obvious symbol of that problem."

Before turning into a rebel, Chamblain was a soldier and a paramilitary leader. In the 1980s, he worked with the Tonton Macoutes, state-sponsored militia groups that terrorized government opponents with threats and assassinations. Following a military coup against Aristide in 1991, Chamblain helped run the Front for the Advancement of Haitian People, a brutal militia accused of murdering scores of Aristide supporters.

''He was the operations guy," explained Brian Concannon, a US lawyer who helped prosecute Chamblain after Aristide was restored to power in 1994. ''Chamblain was the one who organized the head-banging."

Those operations included the killing of some 25 people in a slum in northern Haiti and the assassination of a prominent Aristide supporter. Chamblain was convicted in absentia for these crimes. He fled to the Dominican Republic, while several of his coconspirators, including various high-level military personnel, went to jail for them.