Carl Dorelien, who won $3.2 million in the Florida lottery, was a leader in the coup against Aristide.

 BY ALFONSO CHARDY

 Immigration agents have arrested Carl Dorelien, a former Haitian army colonel who helped lead a coup against President Jean Bertrand Aristide and who, while in exile in Florida, won $3.2 million in the state lottery, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said Thursday.

 Rodney Germain, an INS spokesman in Miami, said immigration agents took Dorelien into custody in Port St. Lucie, where he has lived for several years. When agents went to the front door of Dorelien's house Thursday, he tried to sneak out the back but was caught by agents waiting there, Germain said.

 On June 28, 1997, Dorelien held one of two winning tickets bought in Fort Pierce that split a jackpot of $6.3 million, according to Florida Lottery records.

 His arrest raises to 26 the number of foreign nationals the INS has arrested since the agency last year began detaining people deemed human rights abusers. Dorelien is perhaps the most prominent of the group besides former Haitian police Capt. Jackson Joanis, who was arrested in November.

 That month, Dorelien and other former Haitian military officers who led the coup against Aristide and several of their supporters were sentenced in absentia in Haiti to life in prison with hard labor for their alleged role in an April 1994 massacre.

 The sentence came after a jury found 16 officers guilty of taking part in the rampage, in which dozens of residents of Raboteau, a seaside slum of Gonaives, were beaten and shot to death.

 Besides Dorelien, other defendants included former Haitian junta leaders Raoul Cedras and Philippe Biamby, who received asylum in Panama; former Port-au-Prince Police Chief Michel François, who went to Honduras; and paramilitary leader Emmanuel ``Toto'' Constant, who lives in New York City.

 ``We support the INS actions,'' said an elated Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration attorney who also acts as attorney for the Haitian government and served as lawyer in the Raboteau case. ``There is a criminal conviction against Carl Dorelien for summary executions and gross violations of human rights in Haiti. We hope they will deport him so he can serve his sentence in Haiti.''

 As INS agents took Dorelien to the Krome Service Processing Center for deportation proceedings, Joanis, the former Haitian police captain, was in a Krome court telling a federal immigration judge that deporting him to Haiti would be tantamount to a death sentence.

 ``I will be killed,'' Joanis, former commander of the Port-au-Prince police's investigations branch and anti-gang unit, told the court, according to Carlo Jean-Joseph, his attorney.

 The hearing was closed to the news media, but Jean-Joseph provided details later. The hearing will continue at a later date, probably in 30 days, Jean-Joseph said.

 In the Joanis case, a Haitian judge on Sept. 25, 1995, sentenced him and 16 others -- also in absentia -- to life in prison for alleged conspiracy in the 1993 murder of an Aristide supporter, businessman Antoine Izmery.

 Jean-Joseph said his client was seeking ``relief'' from deportation under the 1987 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
 Punishment, which the United States has signed.

 Of the 26 foreign nationals arrested by the INS since its human rights ``persecutor program'' began last year, Joanis, 42, is the first to fight back aggressively to preempt deportation.

 According to an INS statement issued Nov. 16, Joanis was part of a group of 14 who were arrested after immigration judges found that they ``engaged in human rights persecution prior to residing in the United States.''

 While serving in the Port-au-Prince police, Joanis was a top aide to François, the police chief. Joanis was also a close contact of U.S. military officers at the U.S.
 embassy in Port-au-Prince.

 After fleeing Haiti following the U.S. military occupation that restored Aristide to office in 1994, Joanis drove a cab and came to live on the 5000 block of Grant Street in Hollywood in Broward County.

                                    © 2001