A senior police officer at the rank of Superintendent of Police (SP), Higwira Fredrick is said to have received life-threatening messages from unknown people, who claim to be part of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel outfit.
SP Higwira, the Commandant of the Tactical Response and Neutralization Department, Counter Terrorism (CT) Directorate, is said to have received text messages from several unknown telephone numbers, threatening to harm, or even kill him, and his family.
It is suspected that the messages were sent to Higwira because he is personally in charge of providing security to ADF rebel leader and suspected terrorist Jamil Mukulu to and from prison, whenever he is required to appear in court.
A top Police boss, who asked that his identity remains anonymous since he is not allowed to speak on behalf of the force, told us that, SP Higwira reached out to him a couple of times and showed the life-threatening messages to him on his analogue mobile phone.
“The senders warned Higwira that they knew where he resided with his young children and wife. They said they knew where his kids went to school, and were capable of either kidnapping the children and the wife, or even killing them,” the source told us.
The source further revealed that in the other messages, the senders were asking Higwira to create a loophole in the security ring during the transportation of Mukulu, so that they could help their boss escape.”
The source also intimated to us that Higwira was forced to report the messages to his bosses, after realizing a trend of unidentified men, donning heavy jackets and hoodies, riding on motorcycles (boda bodas) trailing his car, especially a few days whenever Jamil Mukulu was due to appear in court.
“However, his concerns were continuously ignored by the police authorities. Instead, they even withdrew his two bodyguards, citing manpower shortages and gaps within the Police Force,” the source said.
Uganda Police Force is estimated to have about 45,000 police officers, but it is faced with high desertion rates, as well as high death rates that are majorly due to risky work conditions, depression, and sometimes natural causes.
Jamil Mukulu, the leader of the Allied Democratic Forces rebel outfit is linked to the murder of college students at Kichwamba Technical Institute in 1998, the spate of Muslim clerics’ murders between 2015 to 2016, the murder of two police officers in Busoga sub-region, and many other security personnel across the country who were said to investigate cases attached to his ADF rebel outfit.
The source told us, that although Higwira remains in office as he awaits a formidable response from his superiors, the officer is in great fear for his life; “he had to change his place of residence, he changed schools for his children, and they now live with relatives. He also usually spends nights at his office, and at close friends’ residences.)
About Jamil Mukulu
Jamil Mukulu is a Ugandan militant leader and suspected terrorist, who co-founded an armed Islamist rebel group- Allied Democratic Front (ADF), that operated in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mukulu was arrested in Tanzania in 2015 and is currently awaiting trial in the International Criminal Court for charges such as murder and crimes against humanity.
Mukulu first came to the limelight, when together with a group of Tabliq militants, attacked the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council headquarters at Old Kampala. Mukulu was sent to prison for the attack, but was released around 1995.
Between 1996 and 2001, Mukulu’s ADF rebel outfit carried out numerous bombings, massacres, and other terror attacks in the Congo, killing an estimated 1,000 civilians and displacing over 150,000 others, according to a UN study published in 2002.
Uganda’s spy agency, the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) has on several occasions linked ADF-NALU to al-Shabaab.
In 2011, Mukulu was placed under sanction by the United Nations for terrorist activities in the Congo, and became wanted by both Interpol and the International Criminal Court.
In 2014, a court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo convicted Mukulu of terrorism and murder and sentenced him to death in absentia.
