Haiti: coup enforcer's son murdered in Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

Haiti: coup enforcer's son murdered in Honduras

Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 02/08/2011 - 08:40. Jean-Michel François, the son of exiled former Haitian police chief Joseph Michel François, was killed the night of Feb. 3 in the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. The younger François, a law student, was thrown from a moving vehicle in front of his father's electronic appliance store in the Medina neighborhood; he died hours later at a nearby hospital. According to some sources he died of bullet wounds, while others say he was badly beaten and died from his injuries. No motive had been given as of Feb. 5.

The elder François, then a lieutenant colonel, was part of a triumvirate of military officers that overthrew then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a bloody September 1991 coup and ran a ruthless dictatorship until a US military intervention restored Aristide to office in the fall of 1994. François was allowed to leave for the Dominican Republic but was expelled in 1996. He then moved to Honduras. The US indicted him for drug trafficking in 1997 , but the Honduran Supreme Court rejected the US extradition request. The other coup leaders, Gen. Raoul Cédras and Gen. Philippe Biamby, both moved to Panama, where Biamby died of cancer in 2008.

"Crime isn't just in Honduras," François said after his son's murder, according to the Honduran daily La Prensa. "It's in all countries…. here's a saying that ‘everything that happens in the life of a believer is for the good,' because God is sovereign." (La Prensa, Feb. 4; Latin American Herald Tribune, Feb. 4, from EFE; Radio Kiskeya, Haiti, Feb. 4, Dec. 15, 2008)

http://ww4report.com/node/9456

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Son of Haitian Coup Plotter Slain in Honduras

TEGUCIGALPA – The son of a former Haitian police chief living in exile in Honduras after taking part in coup plots in his homeland was killed in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, authorities said Friday.

Law student Jean-Michel François was hurled from a moving vehicle Thursday night in the city’s Medina neighborhood and died hours later at a nearby hospital, prosecutor’s office spokesman Elvis Guzman told Efe.

The young man died of injuries received during a beating, Guzman said.

His father, former Port-au-Prince police chief Joseph Michel François, runs an appliance business in San Pedro Sula, where he arrived in 1996 after being expelled from the Dominican Republic – Haiti’s neighbor – for plotting against the Haitian government.

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