A Haitian-born doctor based in Florida has been arrested as a key suspect in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti, and the national police chief suggested at a news conference that he believed the suspect was plotting to become president.
To date, some two dozen people have been arrested in the killing, but on Sunday, Haitian officials described the doctor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 63, as a central figure in the case.
Even as the Haitian authorities offered their most detailed account so far of the plot behind the brazen assassination of the president in the bedroom of his private home last week, there was widespread skepticism among the public of the official version of events.
An increasingly fraught struggle for control of the country is only adding to the general sense of unease and foreboding as an already grim situation in Haiti threatens to descend further out of control.
A majority of sitting members of Haitian Parliament, which is itself in a state of dysfunction, are calling for a new government to replace the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph.
Mr. Joseph has issued a series of desperate pleas for foreign intervention to stabilize the nation, including calling on the United States to send troops.
American officials signaled that they remained reluctant to provide military forces to Haiti to help secure order, but have sent a team of investigators to help look into last week’s assassination, which has left the country teetering.
Haiti’s national police chief, Léon Charles, said that Dr. Sanon played a vital role in the plot, but offered no explanation for how the doctor could possibly have taken control of the government.
Still, the arrest of Dr. Sanon added yet another element of intrigue in a rapidly moving investigation that stretched from Colombia to Miami.
“He arrived by private plane in June with political objectives and contacted a private security firm to recruit the people who committed this act,” he said. The firm, he said, was a Venezuelan security company based in the United States called CTU.
During a raid at his home, the authorities said, the police found a D.E.A. cap — the team of hit men who assaulted Mr. Moïse’s home appear to have falsely identified themselves as Drug Enforcement Administration agents — six holsters, about 20 boxes of bullets, 24 unused shooting targets, and four license plates from the Dominican Republic.
“The initial mission that was given to these assailants was to protect the individual named Emmanuel Sanon, but afterwards the mission changed,” Mr. Charles said, implying that Mr. Sanon had meant to install himself as president.
A YouTube video recorded in 2011 titled “Dr. Christian Sanon — Leadership for Haiti” appears to present Mr. Sanon as a potential leader of the country. In it, the speaker denounces the leaders of Haiti as corrupt plunderers of its resources.
“With me in power, you are going to have to tell me: ‘What are you doing with my uranium?’” the speaker says. “‘What are you going to do with the oil that we have in the country? What are you going to do with the gold?’”
Two Americans arrested last week have said that they were not in the room when the president was killed and that they had worked only as translators for the hit squad, according to a Haitian judge who interviewed them. They met with other participants at an upscale hotel in the Pétion-Ville suburb of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, to plan the attack.
The goal was not to kill the president, the two Americans told the judge, but to bring him to the national palace.
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