The World - News from June 20, 1986

Ernest Bennett, father-in-law of deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, has denied a U.S. allegation that he had links to a ring smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the United States, his lawyer said in New York. The lawyer, John de Roos, released the text of a letter Bennett sent to French newspapers that printed the allegations, made last week by an American Embassy official in Haiti. Bennett, who now lives in Paris, asserted that the accusations were “aimed at trying in a new way to sully” Duvalier and his family.