President Yoweri Museveni will this afternoon chair and address the National Resistance Movement (NRM) party caucus.
Government Chief Whip Ruth Nankabirwa was this morning making frantic phone calls to all NRM MPs rallying them to attend the “urgent” meeting whose agenda remains unknown even to the MPs. The NRM Caucus meeting expected to be chaired by Museveni will sit at the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) starting at 3pm. By press time, NRM MPs were seen making their way to OPM through the Parliament building.
Sources have informed this website that among the items to be discussed on the agenda include the forthcoming Sheema North by-election and above all the Arua saga that saw many opposition MPs including Bobi Wine charged in courts of law. Apparently, Museveni wants to brief the NRM MPs on the recent events that have unfolded prompting him to issue over 5 statements in the last few days since the arrest of Bobi Wine and co-accused.
According to sources, Museveni also wants to address the caucus following the adhoc committee’s report that was constituted by Parliament to investigate the arrest and torture of the incarcerated MPs who were today released on bail.
The adhoc committee report that is yet to be tabled on the floor of Parliament pins security forces for torturing Bobi Wine, Francis Zaake and others during their arrest and while in jail.
In the report, the adhoc committee MPs headed by Doreen Amule, who is also chairperson of committee on Defence and Internal Affairs, revealed that Bobi Wine and other detainees including Zaake, Paul Mwiru, Kassiano Wadri, Gerald Karuhanga, Michael Mabikke and others are in dire state and need urgent treatment. In particular, the committee recommended that Parliament intervenes to ensure that Bobi Wine is transferred from Makindye Military Barracks to seek treatment out and preferably abroad considering the injuries he is nursing.
The report also detailed how Bobi Wine was arrested and tortured to the extent of crushing his testicles. According to sources, the adhoc report is ‘lethal’ and taints the government in bad light and this explains why Amule declined to table the report last week even when it was ready. She said that she doesn’t believe in the report and that the Committee Clerk did not capture the report as it was intended.
The report highlighted Bobi Wine’s horror narration on how he was arrested and tortured by SFC soldiers. The report states:
Upon breaking into his room, the men clad in uniforms of the Special Forces Command (SFC) found him kneeling on the floor with his hands up in surrender but went ahead to hit his head with a blunt object that he suspects to be an iron bar that had been used to break the door of his hotel room. Thereafter he was severely beaten with gun butts and other objects he had no knowledge of.
Both his legs and hands were chained. He was later wrapped in a blanket and driven off to an unknown location as the beating continued. His testicles were squeezed so hard that at the time the Committee visited him at Makindye military barracks, he informed the Committee that one of his testicles smashed beyond existence. He could no longer locate it within his scrotum. He was later dumped at a room, which he suspects was at the Arua airfield where he was later airlifted to Gulu Military barracks. His clothes were soaked in blood as a result of the horrendous beating he suffered. Removing his clothes later whilst at Gulu Military barracks involved tearing them off as they had stuck onto his wounds. He showed the Committee some of the scars on his body.
Hon. Kyagulanyi Robert Ssentamu informed the Committee that he feels pain all over his body and was only surviving on pain killing injections. The left side of his abdomen is visibly painful and the wounds on his head are still visible. He complains of chest pain and says his teeth were loosened by the beating he suffered at the hands of the men clad in uniforms of the Special Forces Command (SFC).
His plea to the Committee was the need to save his life. As earlier stated, the Committee sighted Hon. Kyagulanyi’s private doctors at Makindye Military barracks on 20th August 2018-the first time they were being allowed access to him.
