Terror grips Uganda after Amin

Then, too, the explosives used to blow up the Kampala Road building just opposite today’s Shell Capital petrol station were the exact same type that had been used to blow up buildings in Masaka and Mbarara and buildings at Ntare School in Mbarara in the closing stages of the 1979 war.

On Sunday June 10, 1979, Christopher B. Mwoyogwona, an official of the Caltex petroleum company, and his eight year-old son Charles Mwiwa, were shot dead by unknown gunmen on the Kampala-Jinja Highway near Lugazi. Their bodies were thrown into Mabira Forest.

At this point, alarm bells started to ring among security circles. With the fall of Amin’s regime, most of his former henchmen like Major Bob Astles, Brig. Ali Fadhul, and Lt. Col. Nassur Abdallah had been arrested or had fled the country.

The priority of anybody who had once worked for the Amin regime, now condemned around the world and whose officials and agents were being hunted down, was to either flee the country or, for those who stayed around, to keep as low a profile as possible.

There would hardly have been a reason to conduct open acts of sabotage when it was clear to all that, with the arrival of the Tanzanian-UNLA force at the Uganda-Sudan border area of Koboko on June 3, 1979, the Amin era was now effectively over.

Besides, the bullet cartridges being found at the scene of these shooting incidents in Kampala showed that the guns used were the Chinese/Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles used by the Tanzanins and the UNLA, not the British-made G-3 rifles that the Uganda Army under Amin used as its basic weapon.

Although Ugandans still felt relief at the ouster of Amin from power and believed they were entering a new and happy chapter of their history, there was a growing sense of bewilderment and fear at the security situation.

If we had been liberated from the dread of Amin’s brutality and terror and Amin’s army too soundly beaten to ever be a factor again in Ugandan life, who were these armed men, in military uniform, who were terrorising Kampala?