New MPs’ report details Bobi Wine torture
MP Bobi Wine laughs at a joke made by Speaker Speaker of Parliament Jacob Oulanyah. COURTESY PHOTO
What you need to know:
- Injured. Six MPs visited Bobi Wine at Makindye Military barracks on Monday and he gave a detailed account of how he was brutally arrested from Pacific Hotel.
PARLIAMENT.
A report by an ad hoc parliamentary committee that investigated the violent fall-out from the Arua Municipality by-election has lifted the lid on the torture of Kyadondo East MP Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, and recommended that he be taken abroad for specialised treatment.
Six MPs visited Mr Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine, at Makindye Military barracks on Monday and the legislator gave a blow-by-blow account of how he was brutally arrested from Pacific Hotel in Arua on August 13.
Mr Kyagulanyi, according to his co-lawmakers, squarely blamed operatives wearing uniform of the Special Forces Command (SFC), the elite unit that guards President Museveni, for the brutality meted on him.
At the weekend, Opposition leader Kizza Besigye said the clobbering of MPs in the run up to the Arua Municipality by-election was the handiwork of a specially-trained commando unit under the SFC.
However, he provided no evidence to back up the claims.
President Museveni, in a statement issued days after the Arua fracas, said he had been briefed by doctors that handled Bobi Wine’s condition that the legislator was not injured.
The Parliament’s Defence and Internal Affairs Committee chairperson, Ms Doreen Amule, who also chairs the ad hoc committee, after a visit to Makindye Barracks this week, claimed that Bobi Wine was in “good” health contrary to public revelations by the family that the lawmaker was in a horrible shape.
Yesterday, Mr Jacob Oulanyah, the deputy speaker of Parliament, visited Bobi and Mityana Municipality MP Francis Zaake, arrested together with Bobi but now admitted at Lubaga Hospital.
He told journalists that both legislators were in “a lot of pain”.
Hit with an iron bar
According to the ad hoc committee’s report, which the chairperson Amule declined to sign, Mr Kyagulanyi told MPs that men in SFC uniforms hit his head with an iron bar after breaking into his hotel room on August 13.
Heavy beatings followed after he was taken into custody, he told his colleagues.
