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This Week in Haiti 14:14 6/26/96

 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
 "This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
 newsweekly. For information on other news in French and Creole,
 please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax)718-434-5551 
 or e-mail at haiticom@nyxfer.blythe.org
  
                            HAITI PROGRES
               "Le journal qui offre une alternative"
  
                       * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *
  
                         June 26 - July 2, 1996
                           Vol. 14, No. 14
  
  
 FROM PRISON, PATRICK ELIE WARNS OF PLOT TO DESTABILIZE HAITI
  
 It is now two months since Patrick Elie, the former head of
 President Aristide's anti-drug trafficking unit and later his
 Secretary of State for Interior and National Defense, was jailed
 last April in Virginia on charges of falsely posing as a diplomat
 and of purchasing firearms with an invalid address.
  
 Elie denies the charges, saying that he was set up for the arrest
 by Haitian Ambassador to Washington, Jean Casimir, after he came
 to the U.S. to investigate and uncover a plot to destabilize the
 government of President Rene Preval. "Those charges are very
 light, they are straw," Elie said from prison in a telephone
 interview. "They don't have a case... It is just something that
 the ambassador is trying to pin on me. It is ambassador Casimir
 who called the U.S. authorities and engineered this plot against
 me."
  
 In early April, Casimir had contacted the U.S. State Department's
 Diplomatic Security Service to say that Elie was making threats
 against himself and other embassy personnel and that he was
 mentally unbalanced and dangerous. Casimir had also called Elie's
 father in Haiti to say that his son was suicidal. "He got my
 father very upset by telling him that I wanted to kill myself,"
 Elie explained. "But I don't want to kill myself. I don't want to
 kill anybody. I want to live. I want to live in a country called
 Haiti where I would like to see everyone living well, with
 progres and peace." 
  
 Shortly after Casimir alerted U.S. authorities, police arrested
 Elie at his room at the Hunter Hotel in Lorton, Virginia, just
 south of Washington, on April 23, 1996. Elie allowed police to
 search the room, where they found several firearms and
 ammunition. He is charged with purchasing the weapons using an
 address on a Virginia drivers license where the authorities
 contend that he can no longer claim to live. The U.S. government
 also says that Elie claimed to be an accredited diplomat, a
 charge which Elie energetically denies.
  
 Elie's road to trouble in the U.S. began early this year. After
 spending two months in Canada, where he has a residence and
 family, Elie returned to Haiti in January to look into reports of
 an assassination plot to kill both then-President Aristide and
 President-elect Preval. Elie says that he worked on the case
 until mid-March, at which time the plot - which had been called