Magara murder: How top Prison boss got in trouble

Senior Superintendent of Prisons Apollo Akankunda Bakwate was arrested a month ago over the kidnap and murder of Susan Magara, but impeccable sources say his arrest may have been triggered by other reasons.
Mr Akankunda, who was the Officer in Charge of Kigo Prison and was redeployed to the prisons headquarters last year, has remained in detention by the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) since then and has, along with the other suspects arrested over the matter, not been charged in court.

Top sources in the Prisons services and the army have told Sunday Monitor that Mr Akankunda may have landed into trouble due to a suspected extra-marital affair with a wife of an army officer and that the Magara murder was a set up for him in an act of vengeance.

On March 17, Saturday Monitor broke the story of Mr Akankunda’s arrest and incarceration after he was picked from the Prisons headquarters in Kampala on March 8.
He is currently detained at CMI headquarters in Mbuya.

Our sources say the officer may have been, “set up by an army officer whose wife he suspected the officer had an extra marital affair with.”
The identity of the army officer who is said to have been close to the Magara investigation right from the time efforts to save her from the fangs of the kidnappers were set in motion, has been omitted for professional and legal reasons.
The officer is suspected to have taken advantage of his position at CMI and the Magara investigation to hit back at his counterpart in the Prisons service by placing him at the centre of the murder that shook the country.

Background
Sources in security told this reporter that Mr Akankunda had a friendship “too close for comfort” with a woman whose identity we have chosen to conceal, who is married to the army officer in question.
The army officer, the sources say, tracked the movements of the prisons officer and his wife using their own telephones.
On the day Magara’s body was dumped at Kigo, the sources say, the army officer used one of the numbers that were used by the kidnappers to communicate to Magara’s family to call Mr Akankunda at 5pm. Intelligence had duplicated the numbers that the kidnappers used.

At the time of the call, our sources say, Mr Akankunda was in Zana along Entebbe Road, where the army officer’s wife also was, while the army officer called from Bunamwaya, which is within the same geographical range.
With Magara then dead, the state intensified its search for her killers and CMI spread the net wide in its investigations, with detectives screening every telephone number contacted by the killers during the kidnap and after the murder.
Mr Akankunda’s phone number, top intelligence sources say, then became of interest as it featured among those called by the kidnappers, albeit several hours after the body was dumped. Even worse for him was the fact that the body was in Kigo in the morning and the telephone mast placed him at Zana, a few kilometres away, in the evening.
Detectives then had reasonable grounds to pick up Mr Akankunda to explain how and why his telephone number was contacted by the killers.

Sources in CMI say the officer has been tasked since his arrest to explain each telephone number captured in his incoming and outgoing calls.
“The number that called him at 5pm on the day of Magara’s murder is the only one for which he cannot afford an explanation and that is why he is still here,” the source said.
Sources close to Mr Akankunda’s family indicated his wife was mulling over the possibility of instructing a lawyer to secure his release from CMI considering that he has neither been charged nor handed over to the police so his file can be processed by the Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

What prisons says
Prisons spokesman Frank Baine on Thursday told Sunday Monitor: “The state doesn’t have an obligation to explain why they are holding him but what we know is that when investigations are complete, justice will prevail. We are also waiting for the day he will be given chance to defend himself. We cannot comment on that other issue of a suspected frame up because that will jeopardise his own safety and someone’s life is involved here. We know he is in safe hands and pray justice prevails.”