This Day in History: October 2

Oct 02, 2022 News

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Compiled by Zena Henry

DR dictator orders execution of thousands of Haitians in Parsley Massacre

Kaieteur News – The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic was the scene of a mass slaughter that has long burned in Haitians’ collective memory but was either unknown or forgotten in the wider world.

It earned the name the Parsley Massacre because Dominican soldiers carried a sprig of parsley and would ask people suspected of being Haitian to pronounce the Spanish word for it: “perejil”. Those whose first language was Haitian Creole found it difficult to say it correctly, a mistake that could cost them their lives. Historians estimate that anywhere between 9,000 and 20,000 Haitians were killed in the Dominican Republic on the orders of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Bodies were dumped in the Massacre River, ominously named after an earlier colonial struggle between the Spanish and French. The killings of October 3,1937 changed the relationship between the two countries on the island of Hispaniola and its effects can still be felt today. (Source: BBC.com)

Military police storm the Carandiru Penitentiary in Brazil, over 100 prisoners died

The Carandiru massacre occurred on Friday, October 2, 1992, in Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, when military police stormed the penitentiary following a prison riot. The massacre, which left 111 prisoners dead, is considered by many people to be a major human rights violation.

The incident was started by a prisoner revolt. Around 1:30 P.M., two groups got into a fight after a game of football; the fight quickly escalated into a prison riot that lasted three hours. Prisoners were reported attacking each other with knives and pipes. The conflict consisted of 2,069 prisoners against 15 guards, resulting in the guards quickly losing control of the prisoners. Around 2:15 P.M., the prison director, Dr José Ismael Pedrosa, informed the local military police Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo about the uprising. The military was given full command of the prison upon arrival about 2:30 P.M. Though the director wanted to negotiate with the prisoners by a megaphone, he was held back by his staff since the police almost crushed him. The prisoners were stripped, locked in their cells and shot. Other prisoners were killed by police dogs. The police released their dogs in the barber shop, where the wounded prisoners were taken. The facility was a detention center, not a penitentiary, meaning that the inmates had not yet been tried or convicted. By the end of the day, 111 prisoners were dead; and 37 more were injured. Ballistic evidence indicated that 515 bullets were found in the prisoners. Furthermore, gunshot wounds were mainly found in the face, head, throat and chest. Hands among the dead were found in front of the face or behind the head suggesting defensive positions. No policeman was injured. (Wikipedia)

The Beltway sniper attacks begin in Washington, D.C., 10 people killed

On October 2, 2002, a shooting in Maryland began a 23-day spree of terror (Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], 2007a).

Beltway sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area killed 10 people and injured three over a three-week period in October 2002. The shooters, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, chose targets seemingly at random and brought daily life in the area to a virtual standstill.

The attacks began when a bullet shattered the window of a craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland, narrowly missing a cashier. Less than an hour after that incident, a 55-year-old man was shot and killed while walking across a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. Although the shootings were not initially recognized as being connected, law-enforcement authorities soon realized that those two acts of violence were just the first of what would be more than a dozen linked shootings over the next 23 days. By the end of the day on October 3, five more victims had been shot and killed in the Washington metropolitan area. Investigators determined that bullets from several of the first seven shootings were fired from the same weapon—a high-powered .223-calibre rifle. On the morning of October 7, a 13-year-old boy was shot and injured in front of his middle school in Bowie, Maryland. Muhammad and Malvo left a tarot card with a note to law enforcement written on it, but it contained no specific demands. More than 30 different law-enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels would ultimately work together to track, identify, and capture the parties responsible for the attacks. (Source: Britannia)

Washington Post Journalist Jamal Khashoggi is assassinated in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul

On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, was assassinated by agents of the Saudi Government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Lured to the consulate building on the pretext of providing him papers for his upcoming wedding, Khashoggi was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi assassins.

His body was dismembered and disposed of. Khashoggi’s final moments were captured in audio recordings, transcripts of which were subsequently made public.

The Saudi Government engaged in an extensive effort to cover up the killing, including destroying evidence. By October 16 separate investigations by Turkish officials and The New York Times had concluded that the murder was premeditated and that some members of the Saudi hit team were closely connected to Prince Mohammed bin Salman. After repeatedly shifting its account of what happened to Khashoggi in the days following the killing, the Saudi Government admitted on October 25 that he had been killed in a premeditated murder but denied that the killing took place on the orders of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Prince bin Salman said he accepted responsibility for the killing “because it happened under my watch” but asserted that he did not order it.

 

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