Isaac Mutebi had just slowed down as he approached the gate—about to hoot for the askari to open for him to drop off a friend late into that dark May Sunday night in Naalya. Then, something hair raising. He was sure he had seen a movement in his rear view mirror. He was sure it was a human form. He didn’t have much time to debate with himself. The confirmation was swift—and brutal.
In a matter of seconds, a man dressed in all black and a hood stood by his driver’s window. Isaac knew he wasn’t there to ask for directions. Now panicking, he attempted to reverse as quickly as he could as the hooded man held firmly onto the car door, trying to make it difficult for him to get away.
“All of a sudden I heard a loud bang; Something hitting the car from the back,” Isaac narrates. The man that had showed up at his door seconds earlier had a partner. Within seconds, the second man would announce his presence in a most chilling way—the sound of crashing glass.
“Before I knew it, the window in the back door on the passenger side was gone,” Isaac continues, adding that in a matter of seconds, both front windows of his VW Golf had been smashed. An arm had in those action-packed seconds reached for the car key and pulled it out. Isaac knew this was it. They were getting robbed, and now, they couldn’t even do anything to get away.
“I was commanded to hand over everything of value I had on me if I still wanted my life. I handed over all the money I had on me—and there was lots of it—as well as my Galaxy S7.”
His female friend was swiftly relieved of her iPhone and roughed up for good measure. The fact that she flatly rejected the thieves’ demand to reveal the phone’s access code had the robber that had appeared last on the scene really upset.
The second thief, who Isaac remembers as clearly intoxicated, was so peeved by the young lady’s action that at some point he said: “Kano kankazikize”—loosely translated as “let me kill her”. It took his sober partner to restrain him, even if he still took the phone— all the while cursing the fact that it would be as good as useless without its password.
Ibra suffers similar fate in Najjera
Exactly two weeks from the day Isaac suffered at the hands of the two robbers in Naalya, Ibra, who was on driver duty dropping off work colleagues was attacked in, Najjera in eerily similar fashion. Again, Ibra thought he had seen some movement in his rear view mirror. He thought it odd considering it was 4am. He sensed danger. His instinct was to reverse and get away as quickly as he could. In a panic, he ended up driving straight into a ditch. Then, that loud bang. He knew what was happening. There was a man at his door already. Unlike Isaac, Ibra chose to fight. It was ill-advised.
“Within seconds, about five men had appeared out of nowhere,” he recalls. Carrying pavers and stones, they made for him. He dived into the trench that moments earlier had ended his attempts to escape. “I made for the trench to protect myself from the pavers they were raining on me,” he narrates. Not even this early show of surrender was good enough to calm his attackers down. They carried on stoning him, while also attacking the people in the car that he had been dropping off. Three of the car windows were completely destroyed. All car occupants were cleaned of their property while Ibra was left treating head wounds and now has a huge scar across his left temple.
When Ibra reported the matter to Police, he says the response left him somewhat stunned. He recalls one officer’s words clearly: “We know some of these men, we know what they look like and what they do and how and where they were trained and how many they are in their syndicate. The problem is that every time we have arrested some of them, members of the public haven’t come up to testify against them,” the police officer reportedly told him.
Most rampant in Nakawa, Kira areas
This style of crime, as Matooke Republic discovered, is becoming something of a wave. In the course of our investigations we were able to gather at least six personal accounts of people that have fallen prey to these gangs, all of whose experiences were similar—suggesting the people committing these crimes might be the same. The robberies happen almost exclusively over the weekend, and are carried out as early as 10pm but often before 4am and victims are cornered at a gate, often in spots where an escape is extremely difficult or out rightly impossible. Plus, the weapons of choice are stones, bricks or pavers, and the most common first point of attack is the back of the car (possibly to distract), then moving on to windows.
We do not have much info, Police says
Most of the testimonies this newspaper came across were of robberies that happened in the suburbs of Ntinda and Kiwatule (Nakawa Division) or Naalya and Buwate in Kira Municipality. A handful of cases were reported in areas such as Luzira as well although when we contacted Kampala Metropolitan Police spokesman Patrick Onyango for a comment he denied any knowledge of this particular style of crime as he confessed that he was hearing about it for the first time. He said Police did not have figures as yet to detail the extent of the crime.
When contacted for comment the Kira Division Police Commander Superintendent of Police Muhammed Sserunjogi said he had indeed heard about the thugs who attack cars waiting at gates, notably in Naalya, Najjera and Mbalwa–Namugongo. The Kira DPC added his forces are yet to make headway in identifying the people behind the wave of crime, let alone conjure a picture of how rampant it is.
“All I can say for now is that we have figured out the areas where the crime is raging, but the [thugs] are very smart and elusive, giving us no chance to catch them in action or even track them,” SP Sserunjogi said, adding: “But now that the election season is over and we can return to policing communal affairs that aren’t related to elections and politics, we are going to have this as one of our major focus areas and we shall defeat this new wave of crime.”
Yet, field patrol officers from Najjera Police Station threw a spanner into the works, telling us that the biggest problem to curbing this rising wave of crime is the public’s lack of dedication to helping them bring the thugs to justice.
