Family accuses LDUs of beating boy to death

The death of a 16-year-old boy has become a deepening mystery.
Swabul Yiga was buried, but it is not clear whether he died after a beating by Local Defence Unit (LDU) personnel, as his family says, or by a mob, as the police say. It is not even definitive whether what was buried in Kabonero, Masaka District, was Yiga’s body.
Yiga, who lived with his mother in Banda Zone B2, Kampala, went missing on October 2, and was discovered dead and buried in Bukasa public cemetery.

Speaking to Sunday Monitor on Thursday, the deceased’s mother, Ms Ruth Nalule, said her son went out with friends to watch an English Premier League game between Manchester United and Newcastle.
Ms Nalule said she realised her son was not in the house late that night when she woke up.

On October 3, Ms Nalule mounted a search for him, stopping at Kyambogo University police post, Central Police Station Kampala and Special Investigations Department (SID) in Kireka, near Kampala, fearing that her son might have been arrested together with Kyambogo University students who had been striking.

She did not find him. And the lonely search continued, leading her to a man who offered useful clues.
“I found a hawker at the university who told me there was a child who had been beaten by soldiers wearing green. He directed me to Ntinda, Kampala. When I reached Ntinda Police Post, I was shown a picture on a phone of a boy who had been beaten and I realised it was my son,” Ms Nalule narrated as her eyes welled up.

Policemen at Ntinda Police Post directed her to Mulago hospital casualty wing, where Ms Nalule learnt that her son had passed on.

“Immediately my back and legs got weak,” Ms Nalule said.
Weak in body and spirit at the moment, Ms Nalule tasked her older son, Sharif Bukenya, a football player with Vipers FC, to proceed to the city mortuary and search for his brother. The body was not there.
Mr Bukenya engaged mortuary attendants and discovered that his younger brother’s body was among those that had been buried together with others in a mass grave in Bukasa public cemetery.

It is a common occurrence that people die in the city and their bodies are deposited in the city mortuary, which virtually has no facilities to preserve dead bodies. When the bodies are not claimed, authorities have them buried. Rarely do such bodies get buried singly. They end up in mass graves. That is what allegedly happened to Yiga’s body.
Mr Bukenya had heard of what befell his younger brother. On engaging the cemetery attendants, he was told that if he paid Shs350,000, the attendants would dig up the mass grave and let the family identify and pick their dead body.

The family mobilised the money and the mass grave was dug up. A total of 20 bodies – women, men and children - had been interred in it.
Last Sunday, Yiga’s family and friends managed to identify and pick up his body.
Herman Kaweesi, a friend of the deceased, said they pulled out seven other bodies before Yiga’s was retrieved.
After the body was retrieved and identified, the attendants changed their mind and wanted a higher fee, arguing that it had been a hell of a job. Yiga’s family and friends ended up paying Shs450,000 to the attendants.

Voice from the ground
Mr Michael Kiyingi, the chairperson of Banda Zone B2, was one of the people who followed up Yiga’s case.
“When I learnt that the boy had been beaten, I went and met the chairperson of Zone K17, Mr Stephen Kanyana, who said he found the boy laying in a pool of blood. I asked him what he had done as the chairman to save the situation,” Mr Kiyingi said. By press time, Sunday Monitor had failed to reach Mr Kanyana for a comment for this story.

In an interview, Mr Kiyingi says he has called Mr Kanyana on phone and Mr Kanyana was surprised to learn that Yiga was dead.
But when he learnt that the media wanted to speak to him, he ended the call and his phone remained unreachable for all the time – Thursday and Friday - we tried to contact him for this article. He was also not at his home when we visited.

At the Kyambogo University Police Post, police denied any shooting incident on October 2, save for the shooting of a man who had reportedly gone to visit his girlfriend at a hostel in Banda.
Yiga’s family and friends believe the deceased was shot due to the gaping hole left at the back of his head. He was buried in Kabonero, Masaka District.

At the police post in Ntinda, Sunday Monitor learnt that the deceased had been taken to Mulago hospital on October 2.
“We received a call for help to rescue a victim of mob justice. We were there and found the boy had been beaten for allegedly stealing a phone. We picked him and took him to Mulago,” a policeman at the post narrated. He said Yiga was crying for help, saying it were his friends who misled him.
Records at the police post and Mulago casualty unit show that Yiga was taken to Mulago by police patrol officers at 10:35pm on October 2 from Kyambogo after he was assaulted by a mob. Yiga died on October 3.

Police chip in
Mr Patrick Onyango, the Kampala Metropolitan police spokesperson, cast doubt on claims by Yiga’s relatives that the deceased had been shot.
“We did not release any bullet to quell the rioters. We only used teargas at Banda when students tried to block the Kampala-Jinja road,” Mr Onyango said.

He said on October 2, the officer-in-charge (OC) of Kyambogo University got information that thugs were snatching phones; that the mob had arrested one and were beating him.

According to him, it was the OC Kyambogo University who called the OC Ntinda to pick the young man, who had been injured and delivered him to Mulago hospital.
Mr Onyango advised Yiga’s relatives to file a complaint with the police if they are dissatisfied with the circumstances under which their person died.

“He will be exhumed and the body will be subjected to a postmortem report to rule out foul play,” Mr Onyango said.
Maj Bilal Katamba, the public information officer of Uganda People’s Defence Forces, First Infantry, which directly supervise the activities of LDU personnel, said they had no incident of shooting in Kyambogo University on October 2.
“We need to see the postmortem report to establish how that person died,” Maj Katamba said. He said there was only one case of mob action reported in Kyambogo University on that day.

Was that Yiga’s body?

Opinions. However, when we talked to a source at the city mortuary about the conflicting accounts regarding the death of Yiga, he said the family might have buried a body that is not of their relative.
“If the family did not go through the right procedure to claim the body, they might have buried a body that is not of their relative,” he revealed.
He asked whether the family got a court order to exhume the body or if they got papers to move that body.

“When we receive a body that is unidentified from Mulago hospital, we carry out a postmortem and write down distinctive features seen on the body for easy identification in future,” the source revealed.
He said a postmortem was done on Yiga and was found with a stab wound in the stomach. “It is those people who sneak bodies from the cemetery creating confusion. If they claim it is their relative’s body how did they identify it?” he asked.

Sunday Monitor established that the family did not obtain a court order before exhuming the body at Bukasa and after getting the body, a one Kakwaya reportedly warned them not to speak.

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