Suspect narrates Kyambogo bullion van robbery scheme

KAMPALA. One of the suspects in the highly-publicised bullion van robbery, which occurred on March 6 at Kyambogo, has spoken out on how the plot was hatched and executed.

The suspect, Mr Alfred Wabuyi, 53, a resident of Kireka narrated the sequence of events before the press on Monday night at the Internal Security Organisation (ISO) base in Nakasero, Kampala.
Clad in a long-sleeved checked shirt and black trousers, Mr Wabuyi spoke with composure for at least 40 minutes with occasional licking of his lips. The father of six children was arrested a day after the foiled robbery.

Mr Wabuyi revealed that he and his accomplices held at least two meetings around the city before the mission.
A former car dealer on Luwum Street, Mr Wabuyi, said he had since ventured into trading in repairing and selling weighing scales. His confession made astonishing revelations.
Three days before the mission, his friend asked him to find him in town for an ‘urgent meeting’. Upon reaching the appointed venue, a friend of his, whom he only identified as Badru, asked him to help him do a simple assignment.

“I received his call while at my workplace in Mutungo and when I met him in town, I found him with three other men. When I asked him the details of the assignment, he [Badru] told me that it involved driving to Mukono to pick some stuff. Since he was my friend, I didn’t hesitate to help him,” he said.
The following day, they held a second meeting at a place from where they were to leave for Mukono. At ISO offices on Monday night, he only identified the people he was with as Bright, Eddy, Badru and another man whose name he could not readily remember.

The arrangements made
He said from that meeting, it was agreed that he and Badru would drive a Mark II while Bright, Eddy and two others, whose details he said he could not recall, would drive a Toyota Premio to Mukono. At this time, he was told that they were going for a very big deal in Mukono.

He said the deal involved trailing a bullion van from Mukono to Kampala. Apparently, one of his colleagues, Eddy, was a brother of the bullion van driver, whom he later identified as Micheal Oketch. According to Mr Wabuyi’s narrative, Mr Oketch had briefed his brother, Eddy, about the deal. Eddy later briefed Bright, Badru and the other colleagues.
He would later learn that Bright was a former soldier under the Special Force Command (SFC).
According to the plan, the Mark II manned by Bright, Eddy and some other guys was supposed to carry the money after the robbery.

They set off from Kampala to Mukono and stationed around Stanbic Bank Mukono Branch, waiting for the bullion van to return from Kayunga, where it had gone to collect the money. Mr Wabuyi said when the van arrived from Kayunga and parked at Stanbic Bank Mukono Branch, the driver picked the drinks and bread which had been laced with sedatives from them.
These eats, Mr Wabuyi said, were supposed to be given to the guards manning the bullion van. It is at this time that they started trailing the van.

“We could overtake them and wait for them because we were getting updates from the driver. We occasionally overtook the bullion van because it made several stopovers. When it stopped at Namanve Industrial Area, the driver stopped and called Eddy, who was in the Toyota Premio with the other men since it had also parked at Namanve to bring him the polythene bags we had bought before we left for Mukono. He trusted Eddy so much because they are brothers. He feared other guys to run away with the money. All this happened while we parked at a distance in our car. Unfortunately, the polythene bags ran out of space and we were told to look for other polythene bags around Namanve. They told us that we would find them on the way,” he recounted.

“But they told us that the pliers they had had failed to cut the seals on the boxes which contained money. The money, which was stashed in polythene bags was just on top of the boxes and that is why it was easy for our colleagues to pack it. The guards who were aboard the bullion van had lost consciousness and one of the other guys travelling in the Toyota Premio had entered the van. It is him and the driver that were communicating with us.”
By this time, Mr Wabuyi and his colleague Badru didn’t know how much money had been stashed in the polythene bags. He said the driver preferred the other car to shuttle the money because his brother Eddy was in it.

Throughout the journey, they maintained communication on phone. The next plan was how to break the seals that contained the other money and by the time they approached Kireka, darkness had started setting in.
Unfortunately, their car, ran out of fuel. They called Bright who was in the other car several times to give them some money to fuel the car and also know how far they had gone but he wasn’t picking his calls. They both contributed what they had and bought fuel.

“Since there was a lot of jam, we chose to drive through Kyambogo University so that we could connect through the other gate so that we could join them since they had told us that they could branch off from Jinja Road and head towards Kyambogo side. But shortly after exiting, we met a scuffle-like scene where two police officers stood by the roadside wielding guns.

The bullion van and a Toyota Premio was also parked by the side. We drove off and I got out from around Nakawa while Badru remained with the car. I headed to my place in Mutungo,” Mr Wabuyi recollected.
However, the following day, Mr Wabuyi says men dressed like civilians came to his workstation, asked him a few details before handcuffing him and taking him to ISO offices. For the last one month, he has been detained at ISO but says his family is aware.

Asked why he and his colleague didn’t stop after seeing a bullion van and a Toyota Premio which their colleagues travelled in parked by the side, he went mute.
He said he later learnt through the press that Bright and another man had been gunned down during a scuffle with security personnel at the scene while the rest fled.

How security foiled robbery

An ISO official, who was privy to the operations that foiled the robbery but preferred anonymity, told journalists at ISO offices that they learnt of the deal from the very time it was being hatched.
The officer said the late Bright Turyatunga, who was one of the architects of the deal, had confided in an officer in another security agency to join them but he rejected the risky deal.
“It is this officer that intimated to us and we started tracking them right from the first meeting. We kept monitoring their movements until we foiled the deal,” he said.

The officer said the bullion driver and the other people involved in the mission are still on the run while two suspects are in custody. He dismissed Mr Wabuyi’s claim that he wasn’t at the scene.
However, he suspected the entire deal was planned with the help of bank officials.
“Banks are supposed to have a tracking system to monitor movement of the bullion van.” Last month, ISO said the money in the van was Shs2.4b but noted that Shs617m had been stolen by the thugs.

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