PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Raoul Cedras, the military leader whose
                  brutal regime prompted the U.S. invasion of Haiti, will be tried for a 1994
                  massacre, the country's justice minister said Thursday.

                  Justice Minister Camille Leblanc announced the trial in a radio interview
                  broadcast, the eighth anniversary of the coup that Cedras led against
                  democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Hundreds of
                  people gathered in downtown Port-au-Prince Thursday to remember the
                  event.

                  Cedras will likely be tried in his absentia, since he now lives in Panama as
                  part of a U.S. deal aimed at preventing bloodshed during the invasion.
                  Leblanc did not cite a date for the trial.

                  The charges stem from a dawn attack on April 22, 1994 by soldiers and
                  their henchmen on a neighborhood in Gonaives filled with Aristide
                  supporters. The attackers shot and killed at least 30 people there.

                  A preliminary investigation of the killings has been completed, Leblanc said.
                  More than 20 people have been accused and are awaiting trial.

                  In all, the military and its collaborators killed as many as 4,000 people
                  between 1991 and 1994, torturing and maiming thousands more.

                  In an effort to return Haiti to normal after the U.S. intervention, Cedras and
                  other military leaders were granted amnesty for crimes committed during
                  their rule. But there has been controversy over whether the amnesty applies
                  only to so-called political crimes or to killings as well.

                  In the radio interview, Leblanc said Cedras "should be judged not as a coup
                  leader but as the author of crimes."

                  The Haitian government has already demanded that Panama extradite
                  Cedras, but officials in that country refused, saying the request was not
                  sufficiently documented. It wasn't immediately clear if a trial and a
                  subsequent conviction would aid in extradition efforts.

                  Few people charged with crimes during the military rule have been tried by
                  Haiti's ineffective judicial system.

                  "The people have never obtained the justice they have been demanding for
                  so long," said Lowinsky Pierre Antoine, head of the Sept. 30 Foundation,
                  which defends coup victims.

                  Another coup strongman, former Lt. Col. Michel Francois, was sentenced in
                  absentia in 1995 to life in prison but remains free in Honduras.