Uganda’s President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has broken silence on how he was forced to personally coordinate and hunt for terrorists who were involved in the recent murder of two foreign tourists in Kasese; after the police and military botched the initial part of the investigation.
While passing out 2000 police recruits in Masindi, Museveni recounted how he picked up the phone and called the security team on the ground after learning that they had mismanaged the crime scene.
“The scene itself was clear because it is grassland, but initially, they mismanaged the work. They came to the scene to trace the suspects using their just their eyes instead of bringing a police dog,” said Museveni on Wednesday.
“Then they piled at the scene just to gaze at it and ended up contaminating it.”
When he heard about this, Museveni says he called the team at the scene the following morning and started passing down instructions including to bring in the police dogs.
“Imagine a man from Kampala is now the one ringing people on the ground!” he said.
“Finally, they brought a police dog which followed the assailants for 15km, after which it got tired and sat down, and they did not have another dog.”
Museveni says if the detectives had handled the scene properly, all the suspects would have been apprehended in a matter of hours.
About two weeks after the October 17th murder of the two British tourists who were honeymooning in Queen Elizabeth National Park, and their driver; the UPDF arrested Abdu Rashid Njovu, who they said was the commander of the squad involved in the attack.
Three other squad members were killed in a fire exchange.