Médecins sans frontières again forced to reduce its activities in Haiti.

The NGO announced on Friday, January 27, to suspend its activities in a hospital in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince after armed men burst in and pulled out a patient to kill him a few meters away.

“They took a patient with gunshot wounds out of the emergency room and executed him in cold blood with a bullet to the head,” the NGO said in a press release. 

The facts, which occurred Thursday afternoon, constitute the second tragedy of its kind in less than six months in this hospital located in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, near areas under total control of gangs.

"From the moment when we cannot guarantee the safety, neither of our patients nor of our teams, we cannot continue to work", lamented to AFP the MSF head of mission in Haiti, Benoît Vasseur.

"It's sad but there are times when we no longer have a choice: a dead doctor no longer treats".

#Haiti: on 01/26 armed men entered the Raoul Pierre Louis public hospital supported by #MSF in the town of #Carrefour.

They pulled out & killed a bullet-wounded patient.

#MSF is forced to suspend all activities in this hospital.

https://t.co/RnH3Yzt38P

— MSF France (@MSF_france) January 27, 2023

Present for more than 30 years in the Caribbean country, the NGO is very often the only healthcare offer for hundreds of thousands of Haitians who cannot afford to pay the fees of private structures.

A service shutdown that should impact nearly 800,000 people

The cessation of MSF services in this hospital in the town of Carrefour, in the west of the capital, means that there will no longer be emergency, quality and free care for nearly 800,000 people, estimated Benoît Vasseur.

The armed gangs, which control more than half of the Haitian territory, use their growing power by multiplying in recent days heinous kidnappings and executions.

On Wednesday, members of armed gangs killed six police officers in a major attack on a police station in the north of the country. 

And health centers are not sanctuaries.

Four of the officers who died on Wednesday had been injured earlier in the day and then "taken out" by gang members from the clinic where they were being treated "in order to execute them", police say.  

Despite this resurgence of violence, MSF has no plans to leave the country for the time being.

"In Haiti, we still enjoy excellent acceptance from the population and the various actors and, thanks to that, we manage to work," explains Benoît Vasseur.

With AFP

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