Investigation into the punitive expedition by the PNH in Martissant on 31 July 2012

At about eight in the morning on 31 July 2012 a patrol from the Grand Ravine police station was attacked by an armed group while making a final security check in Nan Beny. Two officers, Réginald Macénat and Yves Altéma, were injured, and according to residents the police returned fire before withdrawing. Reinforcements from the Unité Départementale de Maintien d'Ordre arrived promptly in five vehicles, whose plate numbers the report records. Every officer wore a bulletproof vest over the uniform, which stopped residents reading their numbers, and members of the force say they were accompanied by civilians, one of them a MINUSTAH informant. Anyone in the way, resident or passer-by, was struck with batons. Street traders' stalls were overturned and windscreens smashed, and officers armed with gas cylinders and lighters set houses alight.

The toll: two residents shot, seven motorcycles burned and two run over, four windscreens smashed, fifteen houses burned sheltering at least twenty households, and businesses destroyed. Victims say houses were searched before being burned and the entire savings of some households were taken, along with identity papers and belongings lost in the fires. The network records that residents told it a foreign force, MINUSTAH, treats them with more compassion than their own police. It says Haut Martissant is treated by the authorities as a dangerous area where armed men hide, but that no such intervention, involving theft, arson, reprisal and looting, can be supported. The Inspector General appears to want the incident to pass in silence. The network asks that the armed men who attacked the patrol be arrested and tried for attempted murder, and that the punitive intervention be investigated and every officer or armed civilian responsible brought to justice.