Bombings condemned

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni has condemned Sunday night’s bombings in Kampala, which killed four and injured several others. Museveni expressed deep sorrow at the acts, Radio Uganda said yesterday. He said the government would intensify its fight against terrorism and its efforts to apprehend the culprits. A senior security source said the bombs were the work of an urban terrorist wing of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel group, while the minister of state for internal affairs, Maj Tom Butime, said nine suspects were “helping police with their inquiries”, according to AFP. Whose weapons? There were conflicting reports about the destination of a military consignment shipped to Dar es Salaam late last month and then transported by rail to Mwanza in northwest Tanzania en route to Kampala, the ‘Monitor’ in Kampala reported on 12 February. According to the paper ‘The Sunday Observer’ in Tanzania quoted high-placed Tanzanian sources as stating that the consignment, which arrived aboard a North Korean ship, included six armoured tanks, 5,000 anti-tank missiles, 5,000 anti-aircraft missiles, 5,000 automatic machine guns, 1,000 grenade launchers, 2,000 boxes of ammunition and 1,000 pairs of combat boats. The newspaper quoted a letter dated 11 January from the Ugandan High Commission to the Tanzanian government requesting the Foreign Ministry “to clear and ensure the safety of the cargo and to provide escort”. However, the Ugandan Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in charge of Regional Co-operation, Amama Mbabazi was yesterday quoted in the state-owned ‘New Vision’ as saying the arms did not necessarily belong to Uganda. According to ‘The Sunday Observer’, a senior Rwandan intelligence official was in Dar es Salaam and visited the port when the consignment arrived there. The paper’s sources reportedly said “Rwanda could have been the real beneficiary of the war equipment and might have asked the Ugandan government to handle the consignment as though it were hers, because it had good relationships and a bilateral agreement with Tanzania as far as such cargo is concerned.” This was dismissed by Rwandan army spokesman Maj Wilson Rutayisire, who told ‘The Monitor’ that his country did not have to use Uganda as a conduit when importing arms through Dar es Salaam.