Haiti’s first lady wants to know where the president’s guards were during Jovenel Moise’s assassination

South Florida (CNN) — When Haiti’s president was brutally assassinated in his bedroom last month, just one witness was there to see it. She happened to know him better than anyone else.Martine Moise, the first lady of Haiti, was found bleeding on the floor next to the body of her husband, Jovenel Moise, on July 7. But she survived the mysterious attack — and is now lighting a fire under the search to bring the killers to justice. In an interview in South Florida on Sunday, Mrs. Moise — still in mourning black, her arm bandaged from wrist to shoulder — described chilling details of the attack to CNN and demanded the world’s help in solving the murder. “Someone gave the order, and someone paid the money. Those are the people that we are searching for. I want the United Nations Security Council’s help to find those people,” she said.Mrs. Moise is the only eyewitness to her husband’s assassination. She is also the only other known victim, her elbow and forearm shattered in a hail of bullets as attackers entered the presidential suite. She first knew something was wrong that night when she and her husband heard automatic gunfire outside their home around 1 am. Once they realized that the gunmen had entered the house, they tried to hide on the floor behind their bed, she said.Even then, however, Moise did not believe what was about to happen. “At that time, I didn’t even think that they were going to be able to get into the room where we were, because we had about 30 or 50 security guards (at the house),” she said. Yet they did, in a massive security failing that Haitian authorities still have not explained. At least two top security chiefs are currently in prison, including presidential security chief Dimitri Herard and coordinator of palace security Jean Laguel Civil.From where she was lying on the ground, her arm broken and bleeding in multiple places, Moise says she could see only the intruders’ shoes. She estimated that around a dozen men entered the room, speaking Spanish, looking for something specific. “They came to the room to find something, because I heard them saying, ‘No es eso, no es eso — eso es’ (in Spanish: ‘That’s not it, that’s not it — that’s it’). Which means they found what they were looking for.” Only then did they turn their attention to the president on the floor and make a fatal phone call, she recalled with devastating calm. “He was alive at the time. They said he was tall, skinny and Black, and maybe the person on the phone confirmed to the shooter that was him. Then they shot him on the floor.”Her husband would be Even after the attack, the security guards charged with protecting Haiti’s first family never came. It was a maid who eventually found Mrs. Moise in the blood-drenched bedroom, and whom she asked to bring one of her husband’s ties to serve as a tourniquet for her arm, she said. A team from the National Police eventually arrived to whisk her away, first to a local hospital she barely remembers and then by plane to a Miami hospital with her children. As she left her home in the dark early morning, Moise said she was struck by the absence of any of the usual guards on the compound grounds. Dozens of guards are usually stationed at the house, she says, and their dormitories are in fact in the basement of the house, in order to ensure seamless shift rotations. “The guards wouldn’t leave without an order. Maybe they received an order to leave — this is what I think,” she said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how this could have happened.””It would have been 50 Government agents from the US and Colombia are already supporting the ongoing investigation into the killing, and their involvement is widely cited in capital city Port-au-Prince as key to its credibility. Nevertheless, the investigation is opaque, and several sources close to it have told CNN that Moise sidesteps questions about her own presidential ambitions with the grace of a veteran politician, but she doesn’t shy away from politically charged topics. She argued, for example, that the interim government must hurry to hold new elections as well as the constitutional referendum that her husband championed, which grants greater powers to the presidency. Civil society leaders counter that polls will be neither free nor fair in the current climate of insecurity, which has seen widespread kidnapping and gang warfare in Port-au-Prince. Nevertheless, elections are currently scheduled for the end of September. “I think that with the election that is coming, with the constitution that is changing too, we will have a better country,” Moise told CNN. “Not in five years, probably not in 10. But we have hope.”For the immediate future, she insists her focus is on her children, her recovery and ensuring that the international community that has so often intervened in Haiti’s affairs now grants the Caribbean country an independent, world-class murder investigation. Though dwarfed by her new entourage of burly American private security agents and facing a daunting series of medical procedures to restore use of her damaged arm, she’s ready to fight. “That’s what hope gives you. You fight,” she said softly. “I will ask and ask and ask until I get.”