KAMPALA: Maj Gen Kahinda Otafiire, the Minister of Internal Affairs, has ordered the Crime Intelligence Director, Brig Gen Chris Damulira, to probe leaders of the National Unity Platform (NUP) for allegedly parading fake torture victims at a UN human rights conference in Kenya last month.
According to Gen. Otafiire, those that were paraded were victims of Boda Boda crashes. The conference in Uganda was attended by some of Uganda’s key opposition figures, including NUP President Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine, Dr. Kizza Besigye, and Alliance for National Transformation (ANT) National Coordinator, Maj. Gen. Mugisha Muntu.
Kyagulanyi indicated in his speech that the government was torturing citizens for political reasons. He took advantage of the opportunity to parade some of the alleged victims of heinous acts committed by state agencies.
“These were Boda Boda accident victims. The government does not drive Boda Boda, and it has never put anyone on Boda Boda. I have directed the crime intelligence director to look for these people and hand them to the CID director so that they can be taken to court,” Gen. Otafiire said on Thursday at the sidelines after commissioning police housing units.
In response, NUP Secretary-General Lewis Rubongoya said they have never hired people to disguise themselves as torture victims. Lubongoya added that some of the victims have been injured by police teargas, and the police have on several occasions issued statements admitting that people were injured by their officers.
Rubongoya tasked Otafiire and all security agencies to identify people they took to the UN conference on Uganda’s human rights status who were victims of Boda Boda crashes.
“There were no victims of accidents. In any case, some of them are in the police reports, like a young man of Makerere who was hit with a teargas canister. There’s no need for investigations and all of them are there; they should tell us who was a victim of accidents,” Rubongoya said.
But Otafiire said that the alleged torture victim masqueraders should be charged with treason as well as the people who paraded them.
Between the 2020 and 2021 presidential election processes, several people subscribing to the People Power Movement, which metamorphosed into the NUP, were abducted, held incommunicado for several months, and then resurfaced with heinous injuries all over their bodies.
Former CMI commander Maj. Gen. Abel Kandiho, who was transferred to the Uganda Police Force to serve as Chief of Joint Staff barely a year ago, was sanctioned by the United States on grounds of having directed or personally participated in abductions and torture of Ugandans because of their political affiliation.