Doctors Without Borders pulls back in Haiti following attack

Doctors Without Borders said Friday it was suspending operations at a hospital in Port-au-Prince after gunmen broke in, pulled a patient out and shot him dead a few feet away.

“They violently dragged him out of the hospital, executing him with a bullet to the head about 10 meters (33 feet) outside the hospital grounds,” the group, known by its French initials, MSF, said in a press release.

The gangland-style attack Thursday afternoon in the Haitian capital marked the second armed gang incursion into the hospital in less than six months.

Haiti has been gripped by a worsening political and economic crisis since the July 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moise, and gangs control more than half the country's territory.

“Faced with this unacceptable level of violence, we have no other choice than to temporarily suspend all our activities in Raoul Pierre Louis Hospital,” said Benoit Vasseur, MSF's head of mission in Haiti.

Vasseur told AFP that MSF “cannot guarantee the safety of our patients or our teams” and “cannot continue to work” at the hospital.

“It is sad, but there are times when we have no choice: A dead doctor does not treat anymore,” he added.

The hospital is in Carrefour, a suburb west of Port-au-Prince, near areas under gang control.

As the hospital ceases activities, some 800,000 people will no longer have free, quality emergency care, Vasseur said.

The NGO said it will remain active in other parts of Haiti.

MSF has provided free medical services to hundreds of thousands of people in the country, the poorest in the Americas, for more than three decades.

Vasseur said both the killing on Thursday and a similar incident in August 2022 amounted to an “act of brutal retribution, which violates all humanitarian principles.”

On Wednesday, gang members killed four police officers after removing them from a clinic, where they were being treated for injuries following an attack on a station in the country's north, police said. Two other officers were also killed.

(AFP)