Chaos and tears of Komamboga bomb blast

First, it was an explosion: boom! Then confusion followed the din. Was it a gunshot, a tyre burst, a bomb blast or other explosive? What was later established to be shrapnel and nails flew in all directions.

Then there was a short silence --- a tense calm for that matter. And in rapid succession, shrills and wails echoed with urgency. Blood began gushing from the injured.

Emily Nyinaneza, a 20-year-old waitress, who was picking money from a couple, lay flattened and motionless, according to witness Ann Tumwine. Moments later, she was pronounced dead.   

Whereas some of the revellers instinctively pinned themselves to the ground, in military parlance took cover, many sprinted away, screaming in horror.

It was a bomb blast, said Mr Emmanuel Sserunjogi, the mayor of Kawempe Division where the attack happened, without explaining whether it was his own assumption or based on briefing by security and intelligence agencies.
The blast lifted up dust, which caked some of the survivors. Pieces of the plastic table under which the explosive was planted, alongside broken plastic chairs, littered the premises of Uncle Sam’s and Ronnie’s pork joints. 

The sight of fleeing bar patrons, a couple of hours after the 7pm curfew, spread panic. Some onlookers sprinted away, before regathering when it became clearer an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) had gone off.

The pain of the cries for help pierced even the most hardened of hearts and steely of minds.
One witness, who declined to identify herself, said she saw a woman’s breast slashed off by shrapnel. Another was cut to the navel. While the blast amputated a hand of a third female reveller.

It was chaos and tears of a blast, later classified by police as an “act of domestic terrorism”. 
Many of the revellers fled not just because of the dreadful bang, but they feared possible arrest for violating the Covid standard operating procedures and drinking at officially-closed bars. 

Drivers speeding on Waliggo Road, which runs astride the attacked bars, had to apply instant brakes and hoot to avoid knocking the escapees.

 Some of the bar patrons fled to their cars while others sprinted away on foot, abandoning their vehicles altogether, according to Ms Damalie Ngobi, who lives near the scene of the incident.

By some accounts, some of the injured who could speak, afraid of being followed by police, begged to be taken to private medical facilities of their choices rather than to Mulago National Referral Hospital.

As such by midday yesterday, police had only managed to trace four of possible eight victims; two admitted to Mulago, one to Paragon Hospital and another to a clinic near the blast scene in Komamboga, in Kawempe Division.
 Whereas frightened revellers sought to escape from police, the blast at a bar, which by presidential directive should have been closed as a means to stem spread of coronavirus, left law enforcement exposed and on trial, according to a verdict by Ms Betty Nakawesa, the  Kawempe Division councillor.

Early reports suggested the explosion happened at Digida, instead of the premises of the shop-cum-bar Uncle Sam’s and Ronnie’s Pork joints, because Digida is more popular as pioneer of pork-selling business in the area.

After volunteers rushed the injured to hospitals, police and other security operatives flooded the area, taping off the bars and chasing onlookers.

The lower ranks could be seen slinging AK-47 rifles while their supervisors holstered pistols. They used patrol vehicles to block roads and yellow taped off the area within roughly a 50-metre cicumference.  

Unrelenting residents and passersby regrouped and massed at the sentries to be greeted by enforcement officers waving them away.

By 11pm, shell-shocked that a suspected terrorist could strike in a city neighbourhood they call their own without the attraction of expats, frightened and heart-broken residents lazily lurched home, consumed by the debate why a terrorist would target a pork joint.