Crackdown over murder of two missionaries

Five people have been arrested in connection with the recent killings of two American missionaries in northern Uganda, bringing the total number taken into custody to 12. District officials said police were on the lookout for more suspects.

Yumbe District Commissioner Drani Dradiga told IRIN in a telephone interview: "The strongest link we are pursuing is a group of local people who resented the church project on their land. We think they hired these thugs to disrupt what they saw as an invasion." He said the evidence would later be made public but that for now few details could be disclosed "This is a very high-profile case and we are therefore handling it with care," he stressed.

Warren and Donna Pet were shot dead on 18 March. A German national, Carola Voigt, 30, survived the attack, but was robbed of cash. All three were attached to the local Evangelical School of Technology in Yumbe District in the northwestern corner of Uganda bordering southern Sudan. The district is 90 percent Muslim.

Police investigations have as yet established no credible links to remnants of the Uganda National Rescue Front (UNRF II), a rebel group that launched an insurgency in northwestern Uganda in the 1990s but signed a peace deal with the government in 2002.

"We have no evidence of links to UNRF II or their former soldiers," Dradiga said. "We can't be sure, but we don't think so."