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(CNN Spanish) -
The police in the Dominican Republic confirmed this Sunday the death in the country of Claudy Gassant, a former prosecutor of Haiti during the administration of the late President Jovenel Moïse.
Ana Cruceta, a spokeswoman for the Dominican police, said the body was found on Saturday with a stab wound, in a place that she did not specify.
On a preliminary basis, the Dominican authorities said that they handle the hypothesis that it was a suicide.
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"So far it is being investigated in case any other evidence appears and we are awaiting the results of the autopsy ... So far it is being investigated as a suicide," said the police spokeswoman.
The death of Gassant, 56, was officially announced by the Secretary of Communication of the Haitian government, Frantz Exantus, through a message on his social networks.
Claudy Gassant (center) in an image from 2001. (Photo by THONY BELIZAIRE / AFP via Getty Images)
Gassant, who was in charge of the Anti-Corruption Unit in Haiti, in 2019 denounced the then Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship, Bocchit Edmond (now Haiti's ambassador to the US) for obstruction of justice in the investigations for corruption that involved diplomatic and consular personnel of the country's embassy in the Dominican Republic.
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Edmond denied the accusations made by Gassant at the time, according to information collected by the local press.
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CNN is trying to obtain the official version that ex-Foreign Minister Edmond gave at that time and has contacted the Haitian Embassy in Washington for their reaction.
Gassant was fired by Moïse via social media less than two months after his appointment as an anti-corruption prosecutor.
According to the Miami Herald, Gassant went into exile after leaving the Moïse government, just as he had done two decades earlier when he settled in Florida after leaving the country during the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, under which he had already been a prosecutor of the sounded crime of a journalist.
He had returned to Haiti to work in the René Préval government, also at the forefront of the anti-corruption fight, but as with Moïse, he was fired from that position.
Jovenel moise