Assassination Probe Adds to U.S.-Haiti Tension : Caribbean: Top official tied to plot, sources say. But Aristide insists evidence doesn’t warrant action.

An investigation of a senior Cabinet official implicated in a failed plot to assassinate a leading government critic has widened after reports that the men arrested in the plot could have been involved in her subsequent death, U.S. and Haitian officials said Monday.

The expanded investigation of Interior Minister Mondesir Beaubrun’s role follows reports that two brothers arrested in the failed plot may have been out of jail at the time attorney Mireille Durocher was killed last week. Sources say the vehicle driven by the brothers when they were arrested was registered to the Interior Ministry, as was an Uzi submachine gun.

The new allegations--combined with President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s refusal to suspend, let alone dismiss, Beaubrun--have deepened a split between the United States and Aristide, the sources said.

“This is a serious problem,” one U.S. official said of Aristide’s perceived stonewalling. “It makes one wonder if Aristide really seeks reconciliation here or is following some other agenda” of seeking revenge against his enemies.

Aristide has rejected U.S. demands for Beaubrun’s removal, saying that there is no solid evidence against him and that even to suspend him would be the same as an accusation.

Earlier, U.S. military investigators had found strong evidence linking Beaubrun to a plan to kill Durocher in mid-March. “We could convict him in an American court on what we have,” one source said.

The plan was discovered and aborted by U.S. military police, who arrested two men and charged them with plotting to kill Durocher, an implacable foe of Aristide’s and defender of the 1991 coup that drove him into exile.

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Despite these efforts, Durocher was killed about 10 days later, on March 28, when she and a companion were ambushed on a busy Port-au-Prince street.

The evidence against Beaubrun includes statements by the two men charged in the earlier plot--Eddy and Patrick Moise, brothers with long criminal records and ties to the Interior minister--and a translator employed by U.S. military police identified only by his last name, Douche.

In addition, the vehicle the Moise brothers were using when they were arrested after Douche informed on them contained a personal telephone book with Beaubrun’s home numbers.

Douche told interrogators that the Moises had boasted of being paid a large sum of money to kill Durocher and of meeting at least twice with the Interior minister in his office.

Initially, even U.S. officials said there was no evidence of a link between the aborted plot and the actual assassination, which led Aristide to say in an interview last week that he had not acted against Beaubrun because there was nothing to tie him to Durocher’s death.

And Justice Minister Jean-Joseph Exume added in another interview that any evidence had been discounted because of the “unreliability” of the Moise brothers.

Some U.S. sources now say, however, that after the brothers were turned over to Haitian authorities last week, they apparently disappeared for several hours on the day Durocher was killed.

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According to this account, the Moises were taken from a downtown prison about 2 p.m. for transfer to the Petionville jail about five miles away.

But no one can account for their whereabouts, the sources say, until after 5 p.m. Durocher was killed about 4 p.m. in a well-coordinated attack on a street about halfway between the two jails. The ammunition used was from the same manufacturing lot as that found in the Moise brothers’ vehicle, although the sources pointed out that the lot involved thousands of bullets.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager said Monday that embassy records indicate that the Moises “were transferred to the national penitentiary” the day before the Durocher murder and were not moved again.

Despite that statement, a senior Aristide aide said Monday that U.S. Ambassador William L. Swing had informed Aristide of the apparent discrepancy and said it was being investigated.

Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, U.S. officials are “deeply concerned” about Aristide’s attitude and actions--or lack of them--in the case.

Haitian and U.S. sources say that an investigation has shown tight connections between Beaubrun and retired Gen. Pierre H. Cherubin, an Aristide military adviser and an officer long suspected of corruption by U.S. officials.

U.S. officials had insisted that Aristide drop Cherubin after the president named him to the army high command following Aristide’s return last fall. Cherubin, who is related to Beaubrun by marriage and was in the same military school class, subsequently was retired along with all other Haitian army officers above the rank of major.

To the Americans’ distress, however, Cherubin has remained in close contact with Aristide, serving as an unofficial adviser. U.S. sources say that Cherubin was influential in the decision to name Beaubrun to the Cabinet and has been urging that the minister be protected.

When asked about claims by Aristide aides that the former U.S. military commander here, Gen. George Meade, had recommended Beaubrun and that the United States had pressured the president to give pro-military elements a voice in the government, one U.S. source pointed to Aristide’s steady stream of promotions for Beaubrun.

“He was promoted to brigadier general, then chief of staff, then Interior minister,” one official said.

Aristide officials say they resent the American pressure and claim that U.S. officials have either delayed passing on information or have withheld it altogether.

They also say that the U.S. posture, which has included the dispatch of FBI agents to investigate the Durocher murder, is directly opposed to its policy of non-involvement when pro-Aristide figures were killed during the former military regime’s three-year reign of terror.