Gunmen riddled the vehicle with bullets as it drove along National Highway 1 between Gonaïves and Port-au-Prince, near Carrefour-Peigne in Artibonite.
Six other people were injured, some of them in critical condition, confirmed the president of the Saint-Marc district court, Jacques Edouard.
For his part, government commissioner François Venson told the press that the attack occurred when the driver refused to obey the members of Savien’s gang, who insisted that he stop.
The head of the public prosecutor’s office stopped the driver because residents of neighboring areas had warned him about the Gran Grif gang’s occupation of the area, according to the newspaper Le Nouvelliste.
Venson said authorities were trying to understand the reasons for their disbelief, adding that some of the survivors were also waiting for explanations.
The attack comes amid Haiti’s already chronic wave of violence, which was responsible for 1,239 murders and 701 kidnappings from July to September, according to a report by the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (Binuh).
“Unfortunately, the security situation on the ground continues to deteriorate as increasing gang violence has thrown the lives of Haitians into chaos and serious crimes are surging and reaching new all-time highs,” Binuh chief María Isabel Salvador complained to the UN the day before -Security Council.
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