www.ugandarecord.co.ug
Who set off the Uganda bombs?
Monday, 12th July 2010
By Timothy Kalyegira
Around half time during the football World Cup final in Johannesburg on Sunday night, bomb blasts went off at two locations in the Ugandan capital Kampala.
The bombs exploded at the Ethiopian Village Restaurant in Kabalagala and the Kyadondo Rugby Club at Lugogo near Nakawa, all just outside the city centre as hundreds of football fans watched the World Cup match.
International news agencies were on Monday morning July 12 reporting that 64 people had been killed. Scores of others were also injured and admitted in various hospitals around the city.
The Inspector-General of the Ugandan police, Maj. Gen. Edward Kale Kayihura, told the media before dawn on Monday that this was definitely an act of terrorism and he suggested that the militant Somali group, Al-Shabab Mujahedeen.
The world media seemed to go with Kayihura's speculation and by midday Ugandan time on Monday had all but concluded that it was the Al-Shabab, although the BBC World Service also left room for the possibility of insurgent Ugandan groups being responsible.
Who might have been responsible for these deadly bomb attacks?
Somalia's Al-Shabab militants?
The Al-Shabab militants fighting the transitional federal government in Mogadishu have recently threatened to attack Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya because of what Al-Shabab says is their meddling in Somalia's civil war.
So speculation that it might have been Al-Shabab that set off the bombs in Kampala during the World Cup final might at first seem credible, hence the way the world media has reported the story with Al-Shabab as the key suspect.
The Ugandan police said on Monday that it had discovered the body parts of the suspected Al-Shabab bomber at the scene at the Kyadondo Rugby Club.
However, on closer scrutiny, the picture starts looking different.
Many Somalis live in Kampala and are ardent football fans. There is also a growing Eritrean and Ethiopian community in Kampala, many of whom have a basic resemblance with Somalis. Indeed, there is a whole Somali-Ethiopian ethnic group in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.
It very well might be that the Ugandan police picked up body parts of an Ethiopian or Eritrean victim of the bomb blast and, without understanding how easily this can be challenged, displayed this as proof of Al-Shabab's role.
Al-Shabab, when they fight their enemies, are explicit about their threats, as just noted above. They warn of attacks in advance and when they are carried out, they clearly claim responsibility for them.
In early June, Al-Shabab engaged in a fierce battle in Mogadishu with the Ugandan-led African peacekeeping force, ANISOM. They claimed to have destroyed ANISOM tanks and some soldiers.
When AMISOM denied taking a hit, Al-Shabab, according the Somali-language news website of the breakway Puntland government, "Al-Shabab forces took some of the journalists to the areas where the fighting took place and showed them vehicles belonging to Amisom troops which they set ablaze. Videos of the burning armoured vehicles were also publicized by Al-Shabab..." (AllPuntland.com, June 5, 2010)
A month later on July 4, 2010, Al-Shabab launched an attack on Ugandan troops in the Abdiaziz District in Banaadir Region of Mogadishu. The Mogadishu-based radio station, Radio HornAfrik, reported at 5:00 GMT (8:00a.m. East African time) on July 4 that "The fighting involving the use of various types of weapons started, according to Al-Shabab...There are no further details from Al-Shabab apart from claiming that they carried out the attack."
On the very afternoon of the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands, Sunday July 11, Al-Shabab shot dead a senior Somali army commander, Salad Hareed Farah.
Farah was shot dead as he was leaving his home at Beled Weyne in the Hiiraan Region of central Somalia.
The AllPuntland.com website yesterday, Sunday July 11 reported hours after the incident that "Members of the religious group, Al-Shabab, have claimed the responsibility for the killing of this armed forces commander...The Al-Shabab commander in Hiiraan Region said the killed TFG official was a spy for Ethiopian troops..."
That, then, is Al-Shabab's fighting and media style. They attack a target, clearly and with pride claim responsibility, no matter now much damage and how many casualties that causes.
All day on Monday, July 12, 2010, the bomb attacks in Uganda dominated the world news. U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the attacks. From the New York Times to the Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Presse, the BBC, Al-Jazeera and other major global news organisations all lead with the story.
Even on the Internet micro-blogging website Twitter.com, usually dominated by western sports and media celebrities and subjects, Uganda was briefly a trending topic, an indication of the major global reach of the story.
Considering how much this militant group thrives on publicity, good or bad, especially hours after such a major global event as the World Cup final in which to publicise their cause and their belief that this cause is a holy and just one, it was odd that by lunch time on Monday, Al-Shabab had not yet claimed responsibility for the attacks in Uganda.
By Monday lunch time, the most that Al-Shabab had done was to publicly express its pleasure at the bomb attacks but did not claim responsibility for the attacks. Since Al-Shabab is already condemned in the eyes of world opinion over the bombs, it had nothing to lose by admitting its role, had it been responsible.
Had Al-Shabab managed to somehow infiltrate Uganda, it is inconceivable, for example, that they would plant bombs at social gatherings when there is a lightly-guarded Ethiopian embassy in Kampala not very far from the Kyadondo Rugby Club, the Ethiopian Airline office in the middle of Kampala with next to no security.
All these would have made ideal targets if sending a message to the Addis Ababa government was Al-Shabab's intention.
Certainly, it makes no sense for Al-Shabab to shoot dead a government army commander on Sunday afternoon, whom they accuse of being a spy for Ethiopia, claim responsibility for the shooting, but somehow several hours later manage to pull off spectacular attacks in the capital of Uganda, the country whose army stands as the main obstacle to their gaining control of Mogadishu, and Al-Shabab does not loudly claim responsibility for the Ugandan assault.
Also, Al-Shabab typically focuses its attacks on what it regards as enemy combatants. It has targeted Ugandan and Burundian troops in Mogadishu, fires shells at military installations or locations of those civilians it regards as directly fighting it or actively collaborating with Ugandan or Ethiopian troops.
Al-Shabab has not, so far at least, been known to bomb civilian and other public places with the goal of causing terror to civilians.
Every sign, then, clearly show that Al-Shabab did not carry out the bomb attacks in Kampala.
How about a message that came from Mogadishu on Monday afternoon, July 12 from Al-Shabab in which the Islamist group claimed responsibility for the Kampala attacks?
As said earlier, Al-Shabab now knows that it has already been condemned by world opinion.
To deny involvement in the attack achieves nothing for the group. Since it is already condemned, the nearest to any value that can be salvaged from it is to belatedly claim responsibility, more as a propaganda tool, a way of strengthening its recruitment drive, than as a factual admission of guilt.
In otherwise, when Al-Shabab finds itself condemned for the crime, it might as well gain notoriety from and exaggerate its role in an attack that might have taken Al-Shabab themselves by surprise.
It is similar to the many instances in which al-Qaeda has often claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks that it might first have heard about in the media, but decides belatedly to claim responsibility as a way of shoring up its prestige among jihadists.
The scene of crime
On Monday morning, an aide to the younger brother of President Yoweri Museveni, Gen. Salim Saleh, was shown on the Qatar-based satellite television channel Al-Jazeera.
Capt. Juma Seiko explained what he had seen at the Kyadondo Rugby Club when the bombs went off. The Presidential Guard Brigade, the praetorian guard that maintains the security of President Museveni, was one of the first on the scene, minutes after the bombs went off.
By midday Ugandan time on Monday, police and military police had sealed off the road along the Ethiopian Village Restaurant where another of the attacks took place.
On Feb. 14, 1999, a series of bomb blasts went off in Kampala. One was at the Telex Bar in the same Kabalagala area as the Ethiopian Village Restaurant and another went off at the then Nile Grill Restaurant on the ground floor of Uganda House along Kampala Road.
There had been a series of bomb scares in Kampala in July and August 1998 around and after the World Cup football championships in France.
Information later emerged that these bombs in 1998 and 1999 had been planted by Ugandan military intelligence and then blamed on a rebel group called the Allied Democratic Force or ADF.
Also, the appearance on the scene by Capt. Juma Seiko is significant. As the Uganda Record reported last November, Capt. Seiko was the first to appear on the scene at the Kampala suburb of Namowongo when the former army commander, Maj. Gen. James Kazini was murdered.
Seiko then went to the Mulago Hospital mortuary and it was he who decided who could and could not view Kazini's body.
When Budo Junior primary school was destroyed by a fire caused by a bomb in April 2008, barely had the news filtered out to the public than Kayihura was at the scene and already designating this as "criminal negligence", before investigations had started.
That Kayihura was quick to speculate and subtly point the world media's eyes to Al-Shabab, mentioning as his proof the bombing of the Ethiopian Village Restaurant, is highly suspect.
However, something changed later on. Having first confidently and on the record mentioned Al-Shabab as the key suspect, Kayihura was quoted by the state-run television station, UBC, during its lunch time news as calling on the public not to speculate on the culprits behind the bomb blasts, including Al-Shabab and said investigations were underway.
Why did Kayihura change from asserting Al-Shabab's possible role to leaving it open?
It is possible that the state, which the Uganda Record believes was the hand behind the bomb blasts, had not anticipated that among the crowds of Ugandans watching the World Cup matches at these public venues, were some Americans.
Six Americans were injured in the blasts and were in hospital on Monday morning. The U.S. media will, inevitably, highlight the fact of Americans being among the casualties.
The U.S. embassy in Kampala, located about a kilometre from the Ethiopian Village Restaurant, will get involved in the investigations and in all likelihood, the Federal Bureau of Investigations in Washington will send bomb experts to Uganda to probe the blasts.
The Uganda Record strongly believes that investigations will reveal that the material did not come from Somalia or any other source and probably came from the Ugandan army.
In reading this possibility, Kayihura hastily retracted his earlier statement pointing the blame at Al-Shabab.
Finally, as has happened with many staged bombing incidents in Kampala and its outskirts since 1998, President Yoweri Museveni visited the scene of crime only hours after the blasts.
This, by itself, is telling. If Al-Shabab had managed to penetrate Uganda's borders and was capable of carrying out an attack right at the heart of Kampala, then this was a matter of high security.
Al-Shabab several months ago fired a surface-to-air missile at the plane of Somalia's interim president, Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed, as he was taking off from the international airport in Mogadishu for a regional summit in Uganda.
It is curious that even with the threat that this Al-Shabab could carry out further attacks on Kampala on Monday, Museveni confidently visited the Kyadondo Rugby Club and the Ethiopian Village Restaurant, with light security and as he was shown on the Kampala television station NTV, apparently calm and in no way appearing concerned for his own safety.
The Uganda Record believes investigators of these multiple bomb blasts in Kampala on Sunday night, July 11, 2010, should open their probe to the possibility that this --- like the Valentine's Day bombings of 1999, the fire at the Kasubi Royal Tombs in March 2010, the Budo Junior School fire in April 2008 and other incidents in which President Museveni has visited the scene of crime --- might have been the work of Ugandan intelligence.
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