The ground shook' Armed drones deployed in fight against Haiti's gangs

The earth beneath Jimmy Antoine's apartment shuddered and for a split second he feared another natural disaster had struck, like the 2010 cataclysm that brought Port-au-Prince to its knees.

- Etienne Côté-Paluck Manisha Ganguly Tom Phillips

"The ground shook like it does during an earthquake. You tremble like everything might collapse," said the 23-year-old trainee mechanic, recalling how he and his panicked neighbours raced out on to the street.

This time, though, the jolt had come not from deep below, but from high above: it was the detonation of a weaponised drone of the sort being used to hunt Haitian gang members who have hijacked most of the country's capital since the start of a coordinated criminal insurrection early last year.

"It felt like it exploded right where I was standing," said Antoine of the 6am attack last month near Sico, the working-class neighbourhood where he lives.

As Haiti's government struggles to reconquer a sprawling seaside city now almost entirely controlled by the gangs, armed drones have become an important part of their arsenal. Since the drone campaign began in March, at least 300 people have been killed by the remote-control devices and almost 400 injured, according to a local human rights group called RNDDH.

Videos of those attacks have spread on social media, painting a terrifying portrait of the drone warfare unfolding on the streets of one of the Caribbean's largest cities.

One such video, which the Guardian identified as being from a gang-run area called Fort National, shows four people - at least two of them armed - moving through an alley before being hit from above by an explosion. Blue and white smoke fills the backstreet as the men scatter.

Another clip, posted on social media by a US missionary, shows an attack on an evangelical theological seminary about 2 miles south-west of Fort National, not far from Jimmy Antoine's home. At least one person can be seen sprinting for cover as the drone swoops towards its second-floor target and explodes. "I have fond memories of teaching in the very classroom it struck," Luke Perkins, the president of the missionary group Crossworld, tweeted in mid-June.