PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A spokesman for Haiti’s National Police said Thursday that officers killed former rebel leader Wilfort Ferdinand after they accused him of opening fire at a police checkpoint in the coastal town of Gonaïves earlier this week.

Ferdinand was a suspected gang leader who played a key role in the 2004 uprising that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“Police had no intention of killing anyone,” police spokesman Michel-Ange Louis Jeune told The Associated Press of Tuesday’s shooting.

He said that Ferdinand had approached the checkpoint in a car with tinted windows only to back up and then open fire on officers, who returned fire and killed him and an unidentified person traveling with him.

Jeune said it was a routine checkpoint aimed at cracking down

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