Murders of senior officers in the last 50 years
The murder last week of the Assistant Inspector General of Police, Andrew Felix Kaweesi, his driver Constable Godfrey Wambewa and bodyguard Corporal Kenneth Erau sent shockwaves across Uganda. Many asked how safe they were if this could happen to a high-ranking police officer.
However, it was not the first such incident in Uganda’s history in which a ranking officer of the armed forces dies under violent circumstances. In this feature, we look back at more than 40 years of similar incidents.
Common to all, or almost all these murders, is the inconclusiveness of the investigation. Most of them were not even investigated. For those that were investigated, not one of these investigations resulted in a final report.
As a result, the more high profile cases have remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, starting with Brig Pierino Okoya’s murder.
For those hoping the police will get to the bottom of Kaweesi’s murder, there is little evidence to support that hope. In Uganda, what happens tends to soon be consigned to history.
Indeed, most of these cases from previous years and decades had faded from the public’s view until this very article published here by the Sunday Monitor.
BRIG PIERINO OKOYA
He was the commanding officer of the Second Infantry Brigade based in Masaka. On January 25, 1970, he and his wife Anna were shot dead at their home outside Gulu Town.
Initially the army commander, Maj Gen Idi Amin, was blamed for the murders. That became the official position at the time, although some in the army believed the assassination had been ordered by the government.
At a press conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985 at the start of the peace negotiations between the new military government of Gen Tito Okello and the NRA guerrillas of Yoweri Museveni, Okello, responding to a BBC reporter, said Brig Okoya was killed by the government.
LT COL MICHAEL ONDOGA
The minister of Foreign Affairs, Lt Col Michael Ondoga, was abducted one morning in 1974 as he dropped his children at Nakasero Primary School in Kampala and days later his body was found at the River Nile. President Amin directed the State Research Bureau to investigate Ondoga’s disappearance, although Western media and some anti-government groups accused Amin of having a hand in Ondoga’s disappearance and subsequent death.
LT COL ANDREW MUKOOZA
After the Air Force commander, Lt Col Ali Kiiza, defected in the last stages of the 1979 war, Mukooza was appointed acting Air Force commander. He was an Amin loyalist. Soon after the fall of the Amin government in April 1979, Mukooza was picked up by some persons and killed. Details of who was responsible remain sketchy, but some sources say he was killed by some of his former colleagues in the Air Force just back from exile as part of the UNLA army and who accused him of betraying their 1977 coup plot against Amin.
LT COL PETER OBOMA
An ardent supporter of the DP party and an outspoken, temperamental man, Lt Col Oboma was the commanding officer of Moroto Barracks in 1981. He is the officer who, a few days after the 1971 military coup, went on Radio Uganda to urge his fellow Acholi soldiers to come out and give their support to Amin.
Amin later appointed him Uganda’s Military Attaché to the Uganda embassy in Bonn, West Germany. In 1981, Oboma questioned the way the army was run and how officers were promoted and he frequently clashed with the Army Chief of Staff, Brig David Oyite-Ojok.
One day in 1981, Oboma travelled to Kampala from Moroto to discuss his grievances with the army leadership at Mbuya. While there, he was seized and killed.
LT DENNIS BATARINGAYA
He was an officer with Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) and had been investing the theft of export coffee from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Mombasa around 2002. He was abducted by unknown men in Kampala and forcibly drowned. It was thought that powerful figures in Uganda were behind the coffee theft.
MOHAMMED HASSAN
Hassan, an Asian-Ugandan, was the director of the police CID at the time of the 1971 coup and in photos of the first press conference addressed by the new military leader, Maj Gen Idi Amin, Hassan can be seen seated not far from Amin and the Inspector General of Police and good friend of Amin, Lt Col Wilson Erinayo Oryema.
He was arrested months later, sent to Mutukula prison near the border with Tanzania where he was killed in 1972.
Many blamed his death on the Amin government while the Amin government said he had died during an attempted jailbreak by prisoners.
CAPT GEORGE NKWANGA
The military commander of the Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda, one of the four main anti-Obote guerrilla groups of the early 1980s, Nkwanga and others agreed to work with the Military Council government of Tito Okello following the July 1985 coup.
The rumour at the time and later was that army commander under Tito Okello, Lt Gen Tito Okello, summoned Nkwanga to a meeting at the Nile Mansions hotel in Kampala (today’s Serena Hotel). When Nkwanga arrived at Nile Mansions, goes the rumour, Bazilio Okello had Nkwanga killed and beheaded.
Another version of what happened was that as Nkwanga was heading into the city centre from the direction of Silver Springs Hotel, the NRA rebels waylaid him, killed him, and started the rumour that he had been killed on orders of Bazilio Okello.
APOLLO BYEKWASO
He was the director of the CID in the 1980s and Inspector-General of Police from 1990 to 1992 before being summarily dismissed by President Museveni in 1992. In December 1998 he was shot dead by an unknown assailant near his home at Nkokonjeru, Kyengera along the Kampala-Mpigi road.
ERISA KARAKIRE
He was the Regional Police Commander for southern Uganda in the mid-1990s. In March 1995 a disgruntled army officer, Maj Herbert Itongwa, launched a rebel group, the National Democratic Alliance and it attacked the police station at Buseruka.
Itongwa’s men abducted the then minister of Health, Dr James Makumbi, and later shot Karakire dead in an ambush along the Kampala-Masaka highway.
ANDREW FELIX KAWEESI
The shock murder of Assistant Inspector General of Police, Andrew Felix Kaweesi in March 2017 is the biggest news story of the year so far and will, quite possibly, rank alongside Kazini’s death as one of those unforgettable murder horror stories in Ugandan history.
With social media now increasingly becoming as mainstream as traditional media, the general view within hours of Kaweesi’s murder was that this had to be either a state assassination or a murder by some mafia-like faction within the state.
The reason for this was the calm and bold manner in which Kaweesi and two of his police aides were killed.
The killers seemed to have all the time at the scene and did not appear to fear that the longer they hanged around, the more likely they might get surrounded and arrested.
It is this confidence and calm that led many Ugandans to conclude that this was no ordinary armed crime but most likely was a political killing.
LT MICHAEL SHALITA
Shalita was an officer in the Internal Security Organisation (ISO) and was reportedly investigating the sale of the national telecom company Uganda Telecom when he was shot dead in Kampala by unknown gunmen in 1996.
He was shot dead in Bukoto allegedly by three LDU men, Sulaiman Musisi, Fred Wandera and Joseph Musana. In court the three men said they had acted in self-defence. When they confronted him one night, he drew his pistol forcing them to open fire.
JAMES HABUCHIRIRO
A Senior Superintendent of Police, he was the officer in-charge of Serious Crime. When lawyer Robinah Kiyingi was gunned down in July 2005, it fell in line of Habuchiriro’s work to investigate the murder.
However, while investigating it Habuchiriro was approached by an armed man one evening at Yakubu’s joint, a drinking and leisure place in Ntinda, Kampala, and shot dead. There has not been a report into his murder since then.
MAJ GEN JAMES KAZINI
The gruesome death of the former army commander Maj Gen James Kazini in 2009 was one of the most shocking and most discussed news stories of the last 10 years.
He was killed at the home in Nawuwongo, Kampala, of his mistress Lydia Draru shortly before he was to have left on a trip to South Sudan.
Draru was sentenced to 14 years in jail as the prime suspect for his murder, although there are very few Ugandans to this day who believe Draru had the ability to overcome Kazini and beat him to the extent of totally disfiguring him.
To this day, the overwhelming unofficial public view is that Kazini was eliminated by the state or some elements in the state.
