• Soldier died of his wounds after gunfight
• Authorities warned of risk of ‘bloodbath’

Fears are growing over an increasingly febrile security situation in Haiti after police and soldiers fought a deadly gun battle which lasted for hours outside the country’s presidential palace.

The exchange of gunfire on Sunday shattered the opening of Haiti’s annual carnival as police and soldiers exchanged volleys of gunfire sending bystanders diving for cover.

As conflict racks the nation and anger at a political scandal grows, Haitians are rallying to the country’s founding father more than 200 years after his assassination

On the walls across Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a stencilled image can be found. Depicting a figure in a Napoleonic-era cocked hat and military frock coat, it first emerged amid the country’s long-running political and security crisis that began last year.

The man portrayed is Jean-Jacques Dessalines – Emperor Jacques I of Haiti – the rebel general who defeated French forces at the battle of Vertières to found the state of Haiti in 1804. And it is not only in graffiti that Dessalines’s two centuries-old legacy has been seen in the recent months of political turmoil that has gripped the country.

• Jean Marie Ralph Féthière draws handgun amid chaotic scenes
• Chery Dieu-Nalio avoids serious injury; another man wounded

Two men including a photojournalist have been shot and injured by a Haitian senator who opened fire outside the country’s parliament, amid chaotic scenes as the government attempted to confirm the appointment of a new prime minister.

Chery Dieu-Nalio, an Associated Press photographer, was wounded in the face and a second man, Leon Leblanc, a security guard and driver, was also injured in the incident in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, on Monday.

A nation that suffered under the Duvalier dictators is collapsing as corruption and a failing economy take their toll

Last Sunday, Rony Marceline was riding his motorbike out of Ouanaminthe, a muggy, colourful town on Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic, on a mission that within a few days has become commonplace: transporting yellow plastic containers of petrol. He hit a lorry and the canister split, enveloping him and his passenger, an as yet unnamed woman, in flames.

Until that moment, the newly necessary practice of carrying cans of fuel had been the subject of meme humour in this country where the petrol is running out and the usually intense traffic is stuttering to a halt. In one, an elegant woman carries a can under the caption: “the new accessory”. But now there is no joking: now the whole country is ready to explode.