AMIN: I ALREADY PUT BEN KIWANUKA'S KILLERS ON FIRING SQUAD!

                                   Photo: His Excellency Field Marshal President Idi Amin Dada.

Madame Speaker, Members of Parliament, citizens of Uganda!

First of all, I want to start by saying here that if anything happens to me, just know who is responsible.

September 2022 is the 50th anniversary of the tragic abduction and disappearance of Uganda's Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka.

What the 1974 Commission of Inquiry revealed about this disturbing case, and what the government investigations achieved back then, is that Amin already got all those behind this heinous, senseless crime and put them on firing squad as everyone has seen in the news pictures.

However, one other individual has since come out declaring himself the only survivor of the gang, thus incriminating himself in this harrowing case. He therefore now has to answer to the families of his victims, particularly on the question of the whereabouts of Ben Kiwanuka's body.

As far as the Amin government was concerned, the criminals were found when one of them was seen in Mbale driving the very vehicle whose registration number UUU 171 was reported by eye witnesses at the scene of Ben Kiwanuka's abduction which had happened exactly four months earlier. The armed kidnappers were, according to their own comrades' subsequent statements in the press, plotting their next crimes from this town in Eastern Uganda. Evidence reportedly collected from their hideout after it was raided by police included a hit list of names of senior public personalities to abduct and/or murder, a list said to have had the names Ben Kiwanuka already ticked presumably as mission completed.

Three terrorists were reported as neutralized on the spot that January day, and one officer injured. The exchange of fire took place at House 49, Maluku Housing Estate as the terrorists started shooting their way out of their surrounded hideout.

Other simultaneous raids got other terrorists. In all twelve were got alive, put on trial, and sentenced to firing squad for murder the following month on February 11th.

However, one had fled arrest in Mbale, and nobody knew who this scampering criminal was until when the criminal himself wrote about his own escape in his own book "Sowing The Mustard Seed!"

He wrote: "When Amin's soldiers knocked at the door asking about the vehicle, I knew we were finished. I had the car keys in my pocket".

As the escapee talks about this Mbale incident, he is careful not to clarify that this raid was about Ben Kiwanuka's abduction. He is also careful not to say that the vehicle was being searched for in that particular investigation. And he is even more careful not to explain that his worry when asked about this vehicle was simply because it was evidence that linked him directly to the Ben Kiwanuka abduction.

Instead, he skips to how he fled arrest and started shooting senselessly, including at the huge crowd of onlookers that had joined the officers in the pursuit to try and catch him.

This case is therefore really simple: The person driving Volkswagen number UUU 171 clearly has some explaining to do to the people of Uganda regarding the Ben Kiwanuka case. Even a kid can see that!

Meanwhile, it seems that the fugitive was originally just trying to show off to the public that he once "fought Amin soldiers in Mbale", forgetting that this incident was a security operation specifically hunting for Ben Kiwanuka's kidnappers. And thus the unwitting revelation by the fugitive that he was one of the people surrounded that day at House 49, and also that he was the driver of the vehicle parked outside, links him directly to Ben Kiwanuka's abduction.

Basically had he just shut up about the whole Mbale incident, nobody would have ever been able to connect the dots, nobody would have ever been able to link the crime to him ever, and I wouldn't be writing this sad history today.

Madame Speaker, Members of Parliament, Let's rewind all this for a moment!

It all started on 19th September 1973 when a major invasion of Ugandan rebels from Tanzania took place. They were however swiftly defeated in battle and started undressing frantically. Each one left their rebel uniforms wherever they were and ran to mix into the civilian population where citizens themselves first started clobbering them in mob justice. However others managed to flee for dear life and vanished in thin air. Just three days later on the 22nd, Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka was abducted in broad daylight from his offices in Kampala.

In the three months following Ben Kiwanuka's abduction, at least eight other senior personalities were also kidnapped and disappeared in exactly the same modus operandi, never to be seen alive again.

Including Joseph Mubiru (Governor Bank of Uganda) who was abducted just one week after Ben Kiwanuka. Then followed by the kidnap of Frank Kalimuzo (Vice Chancellor of Makerere University), Minister John Kalema, Minister Basil Bataringaya, Hajji Kasigwa (Town treasurer of Jinja), Jolly Joe (comedian and labour activist), and others (RIP).

But it all started with Ben Kiwanuka, Uganda's first ever indeginous Prime Minister, a legacy not diminished even by time.

Many might have seen a picture of Captain Tom Masaba of the Uganda Army, surrounded by his fellow soldiers before he was executed by firing squad, in public, on 10th February 1973. He is reportedly the person who gave the terrorists the vehicle whose number plate eye witnesses had noted at the broad daylight abduction. The eyewitnesses had actually reported a Peugeot 504 registration number UUU 171. When police checked the vehicles register at the Ministry of Transport, they found that this number was registered to a Volkswagen, not a Peugeot, and that the Volkswagen actually belonged to the army. So investigators went to the military to find out who in the army had been assigned the Volkswagen. That's when Captain Tom Masaba was summoned as the person who was assigned Volkswagen beetle UUU 171.

A thorough interrogation then took place, and Captain Tom Masaba made all the revelations about the terrorist group he had been working with behind everyone's back, including how they had simply swapped the number plates of the two vehicles. Masaba also gave information about the whereabouts of the Volkswagen and the terrorists hideout.

Acting on this information extracted from Captain Masaba, investigators mounted surveillance at House 49, Maluku Housing estate. It is then that undercover agents saw the wanted Volkswagen arriving at the premises. Other terrorists were inside the premises already and about to have a meeting on their next operation. Police decided to knock at the door.

Simultaneously, other raids took place which netted 12 terrorists alive, including the late James Karambuzi, all of them arrested on information obtained from Tom Masaba's interrogation.

It is noteworthy that evidence found at the scene corroborated Masaba's information, and more weapons were found as recently as 27th August 2018 by workers who were building a new house for Karambuzi's family on his home premises in Kabale. Police was called in to retrieve the now rusted cache (Picture below).

                                                 Kabale Police Karambuzi Guns 2018.

However back in 1973, when asked if he had any last words, Captain Tom Masaba apologized for his crimes to all the Ugandans watching the firing squad that day (picture below).

Captain Tom Masaba Firing Squad 1973.jpg

I have not written this lightly, and have done so knowing that those who feel entitled to getting away with murder, might be displeased. However I have done this for the people of Uganda, for the victims, for their bereaved relatives, and for this country to start putting it's difficult truths on the table.

So after 50 years of hiding in plain site and spewing propaganda, disinformation and political theatre on these murders as has been seen during the annual memorials, there is now nowhere else for the killer to hide from these crimes. He mistakenly incriminated himself, and he is now out there for everyone to see every day as he pretends to be busy on matters of national significance. However, I urge him to first come clean and just apologize to the families of the deceased and tell them the whereabouts of the remains of all the hapless victims.

In a TV interview during his 1980's bush war about a decade after these abductions and disappearances, rebel leader Yoweri Museveni stated: "At least Amin only targeted the elites, but Obote is just slaughtering everyone."

Museveni was at the time leading his infamous five year rebel war to topple the brutal tribalism of President Apollo Milton Obote. A conflict known to have left hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants dead, and both Obote and Museveni even decorating Uganda's roadsides with the skulls of their victims as the two fought each other for power after Amin.

In all of this we have to ask ourselves one simple mathematical question: If on one hand Apollo Milton Obote was a mass murderer who was just "slaughtering everyone", (though later in life Apollo apologized to Amin for all the false accusations in a phone call from exile in Zambia to Amin in Saudi Arabia), and on the other hand Museveni was found in Mbale instigating the very abductions and disappearance's of elites whom he then says Amin killed, who then are the actual two monsters of Uganda, and who therefore is the upright leader who for decades has been wrongfully accused of murder?

Furthermore, there is this unfathomable level of macabre where the self-confessing culprit of the murders of elites attends the annual memorials of the very elites he brutally murdered. Many would equate this to a killer symbolically dancing on the dead bodies of his victims, even decades after killing them. Essentially the cruelty of wanting to disturb the peace of the dead 50 years later, and doing so in eery somberness right in front of the victims' families and some Ben Kiwanuka betrayers. Yet as the self-confessed sole survivor of the Mbale incident where all four men found to have heinously disappeared Chief Justice Ben Kiwanuka were dealt with, why doesn't he just tell Democratic Party Secretary General Nobert Mao, the party members, the public, and the poor late Ben Kiwanuka's family where he and his fellow criminals dumped the late Chief Justice's body so that the deceased can be given an appropriate state funeral?

In light of all this, I would like everyone to know that we the Amin family understand best anyone who has suffered immense mental trauma and harrowing emotional distress stemming from cruel disinformation waged against them with false and baseless accusations that are literally hurting innocent people and generating tremendous stigma, grotesque myths, ridicule, malice, demonization and propaganda against any innocent person.

Who on this planet has been able to withstand the worst lies and the most vagabond insults against an innocent person more than what Amin has been the victim of, yet remaining silent and not even responding to the deliberate cruel misinformation orchestrated against him every single day for over fifty years and counting, by angry, malicious, unapologetic killers and political charlatans who frantically try to dodge carrying responsibility for their own actions?

Signed: Lumumba Amin

Kampala, Uganda.