DOCTORS Without Borders said yesterday 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 metres away.

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

The gangland-style attack on 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 said.

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 group 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 last August 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, January 28, 2023.