2 EX-HAITIAN NATIONAL POLICE OFFICIALS SENTENCED IN DRUG CASE

MIAMI (AP) -- Haiti's former national police commander, who was accused of
protecting Colombian cocaine shipments through his destitute homeland, was
sentenced to almost 15 years in prison.

Rudy Therassan pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court last April to
conspiring to import at least 22 pounds of cocaine into the United States
and laundering money. As part of the plea agreement, six other counts were
dropped.

Therassan, who headed the Haitian national police from 2001 until 2003,
must also forfeit $1.8 million in assets, including two houses in Palm
Beach County.

His sentence was reduced by about five years for giving prosecutors
information about Haitian and Colombian traffickers who bribed him and
others to move their drug shipments through the island.

Prosecutors said Therassan, 40, was the ringleader of corrupt Haitian law
enforcement officials who helped traffickers unload tons of cocaine from
planes allowed to land on a major highway near the Port-au-Prince airport.

He was arrested as part of a 3-year-old probe that has resulted in the
arrests of 14 Haitians who held top government and private jobs during the
administration of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They include
law enforcement officials, a former Haitian senator, a former presidential
palace security chief and American Airlines' former director of security at
the Port-au-Prince airport.

Therassan is expected to be a witness in the trial of alleged Haitian drug
trafficker Serge Edouard, which is scheduled to begin Monday.

Haiti's former national police director, Jean Nesly Lucien, 44, was also
sentenced Wednesday to nearly five years on a money-laundering conspiracy
charge. He must forfeit $180,000.

An informant told Drug Enforcement Administration agents that Lucien and
former Haitian anti-drug chief Evintz Brillant seized $450,000 in drug
profits from a Colombian trafficker in 2002, returned $300,000, split the
rest with other corrupt officers and agreed to split the take on future
drug shipments through the airport in the Haitian capital.

Brillant and Romaine Lestin, former Port-au-Prince airport police
commander, face trial in September.