A Spirit Airlines flight attempting to land in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was shot at on Monday and forced to divert, marking a sharp escalation in the violence that has gripped the nation.
Flight 951, which took off from Fort Lauderdale for Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, was struck several times and landed in Santiago, in the Dominican Republic, according to Tommy Fletcher, a spokesman for the airline.
“An inspection revealed evidence of damage to the aircraft consistent with gunfire,” Mr. Fletcher said in a statement. “One flight attendant on board reported minor injuries and is being evaluated by medical personnel.”
No passengers were hurt, the airline said. Spirit suspended flights to Port-au-Prince and to the northern Haitian city Cap-Haïtien. The plane was taken out of service.
The gunfire appeared to come from the ground, though it was unclear who fired the shots. Gangs that have inflicted a campaign of violence in Haiti are also known to be active in the area around the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
Flight monitoring websites showed a JetBlue plane turning around and heading away from Haiti, as the Port-au-Prince airport was quickly shut down. JetBlue and American Airlines canceled flights to and from Haiti until Thursday afternoon. A JetBlue spokesman said the airline would monitor the situation to determine whether any more flights needed to be called off.
Officials at Haiti’s aviation authority did not return calls seeking more information.
The episode marks the second time in as many months when an aircraft in Haiti has been hit by gunfire. A United Nations helicopter with three crew members and 15 passengers on board was shot at late last month and hit several times as it flew over a gang-controlled neighborhood in the capital.
In recent weeks, social media has been filled with photographs of a U.S. armored vehicle sent to Haiti to help quell the violence engulfed in flames, reportedly set ablaze by a gang. Gangs fired on two U.S. Embassy vehicles traveling in Port-au-Prince last month.
The attack on the Spirit plane comes a day after Haiti’s interim prime minister was fired by the country’s transition presidential council — a board of nine people that is ruling Haiti until elections can be held to select a president.
The prime minister, Garry Conille, was hired in late May to help restore order in Haiti, where a coalition of gangs united earlier this year and wreaked havoc on the capital, attacking neighborhoods, police stations and hospitals.
The airport was closed for several months and murders soared.
Hundreds of police officers from Kenya flew to Haiti in June as part of an international effort to restore peace.
The Kenyan force, known as the MSS -— Multinational Security Support —- helped the country recover at least some minimal semblance of order, which allowed the airport to reopen earlier this year.
Hundreds of homes around the airport were bulldozed to expand the airport’s security perimeter, and to give the gangs fewer places to hide out.
But the gangs have escalated attacks, including outside Port-au-Prince. One gang attacked a community in the rural Artibonite Valley last month, killing more than 100 people.
Godfrey Otunge, the Kenyan police official who is commander of the multinational force, said in a statement that the force was still in the deployment phase and was transitioning to the “decisive operations phase.”
Last week, statements by the multinational force stressed that officers had brought peace back to Pont-Sondé, where the massacre in the valley occurred, and had made important strides, such as opening up roads that had been under gang control. The deployment “shall strive to ensure that for once local Haitians will enjoy their Christmas festivities in peace,” one recent statement said, adding that it was putting gang members on notice.
“We are coming for them,” the statement said. “We will smoke them from their enclaves and hide-outs and ensure that they face the rule of law. Their time is simply running out.”
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