PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) -- A high-ranking police official under
                 the military junta that ruled Haiti in the early 1990s was deported from the
                 United States and jailed in connection with the 1993 assassination of Haiti's
                 justice minister, police said on Wednesday.

                 Jackson Joanis, already convicted in absentia in Haiti for another murder, was
                 expelled from the United States on Monday and arrested along with several other
                 criminal deportees when he arrived in Port-au-Prince that day, Haitian National
                 Police spokesman Jean Dady Simeon said.

                 "Joanis is being held at the National Penitentiary for the involvement in the murder
                 of Justice Minister Guy Malary on October 14, 1993," Simeon said.

                 Joanis was an army captain and police station chief who directed an anti-gang unit
                 under the military regime that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power
                 in 1991.

                 Joanis has been wanted by Haitian authorities for years for his alleged role in the
                 murder of Malary, Aristide's justice minister during his first administration.

                 Malary was gunned down in the capital one day after the United States and United
                 Nations reimposed sanctions on the junta government, which had prevented the
                 USS Harlan County from docking in Haiti to begin a U.S.-led peacekeeping mission.

                 Joanis entered the United States in 1994 on a tourist visa and sought political
                 asylum after the coup regime was forced out and a U.S.-led multinational force
                 restored to power the democratically elected Aristide.

                 In 1995, Joanis was convicted in absentia in Haiti in the 1993 murder of
                 businessman Antoine Izmery, an ardent Aristide supporter who had spoken out
                 against the coup plotters. Izmery was dragged out of Mass at the Sacred Heart
                 Church in Port-au-Prince and shot and killed.

                 The murder conviction made Joanis ineligible for residency in the United States,
                 which ordered him deported. Joanis, who was sentenced to hard labor for life on
                 the Izmery conviction, unsuccessfully challenged the deportation order, arguing
                 that he faced torture if returned to Haiti.

                 The presence of Haiti's former paramilitary leaders in the United States has long
                 been a thorny subject in relations between the two countries.

                 Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, former leader of the FRAPH paramilitary group that
                 human rights groups have linked to thousands of murders during the military
                 government, lives in Queens, New York, and has resisted all efforts to deport him.

                    Copyright 2002 Reuters.