First arrest for Bwindi park killings

Police in Uganda on Friday reported having made their first arrest in connection with the 1999 massacre of eight foreign tourists and a Ugandan national in Bwindi National Park, southwestern Uganda. Elizabeth Kuteesa, acting Director of Kampala’s Criminal Investigation Department, named the man as Akim Byorugaba, the BBC reported. The attack had always been blamed on Rwandan Interahamwe militia members but the man arrested was Ugandan, it said. On 1 March 1999, a group of armed men abducted 14 tourists and their guide from Bwindi National Park, a sanctuary for rare mountain gorillas. The group was marched through the jungle toward the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) before nine of the captives - four Britons, four Americans and a Ugandan park warden - were butchered to death with clubs and machetes.

The massacres devastated Uganda’s tourist industry and a year after the attack, President Yoweri Museveni made a well-publicised visit to Bwindi in an attempt to convince visitors that the park was now safe, the BBC reported. Bwindi is one of the few places where tourists can see the mountain gorillas. There are only about 600 left in the world and they live in the bamboo thickets on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes, which straddle Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC.