ADF leader Jamil Mukulu (R) with senior commanders in Eastern DRC. (Internet file photo)
By TZ Business News Staff.
The Tanzania Government has confirmed the arrest of a person security forces suspect might be the Ugandan rebel leader Jamil Mukulu who is also linked to the terrorist group Al Qaida; but they are not certain about his identity and therefore they cannot confirm the person arrested by Tanzania security forces is indeed Jamil Mukulu.
”Yes we have made an arrest, but we are waiting for Uganda to confirm that the person we have is indeed Jamil Mukulu,” a senior official in the Tanzania security system has told TZ Business News. “It is only after this confirmation from our Ugandan counterparts that we will tell you and other media institutions for certain that we have Jamil Mukulu.”
Earlier reports from Uganda said Tanzania has Detained the Ugandan Rebel Leader Jamil Mukulu but there had not been an official word from the Tanzania Government on the arrest.
Media reports said Tanzanian authorities have detained Jamil Mukulu, the leader of the Congo-based Ugandan Islamist rebel group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in a major boost for the United Nations-backed operations to pacify the lawless region.
Mr. Mukulu, who is accused of commanding a spate of brutal attacks against civilians in both Uganda and Congo since the late 1990s, was arrested in Tanzania earlier [in April] after entering the country from eastern Congo, the Ugandan military said.
“I can confirm that we have positively identified the suspect as Jamil Mukulu,” a senior Ugandan military official, who declined to be named, told the American Wall Street Journal. “We are now working with the Tanzanian authorities to repatriate him”
Tanzania security forces have increased vigilance in recent months–a posture responsible for the recent defusing of an imminent terrorist attack in the region of Morogoro in eastern Tanzania in April, 2015.
Other Media reports speculated that the repatriation was planned for the week-end starting May 1, 2015, but the security official who talked to TZ Business News on Saturday, May 2, 2015 said the identification had not been done yet, and that Tanzanian security forces were still waiting for their Ugandan counterparts to arrive for the identification.
The arrest [if correct] brings to an end a long manhunt for one of the region’s most brutal rebel leaders. Ugandan and Tanzanian authorities must now devise ways of ensuring that Mr. Mukulu faces justice, without giving him a platform to turn himself into hero, especially within the region’s sizable Muslim community.
Fred Enanga Uganda’s police spokesman said separately that Mr. Mukulu would be tried at Uganda’s international crimes division in Kampala after he has been repatriated.
“We are aware that he has committed crimes beyond our borders but it is Uganda which initiated his arrest warrant” Mr. Enanga said. Tanzanian officials couldn’t immediately comment on the development.
Mr. Mukulu, a former Roman Catholic who converted to Islam, founded the group in the 1990s, to topple the Ugandan government. Since the late 1990s, Mr. Mukulu and his fighters have swept across Uganda and eastern Congo, killing thousands of people, mainly civilians, aid officials say. Mr. Mukulu is facing charges of murder, terrorism and treason.
The ADF fled a Ugandan army offensive around 2000 and established rear bases in the eastern DRC. Their presence has for years acerbated the lawlessness in Congo in addition to giving Kampala a pretext for intervening there.
In 1998, ADF rebels massacred 80 students during an attack at a college in western Uganda. In November last year, ADF rebels killed more than 100 people in series of gruesome attacks in Eastern Congo, according to the U.N.
Last year, Tanzanian forces attacked ADF rebel camps near Congo’s gold trading town of Beni, shortly after defeating another rebel group, known as the M23 in a U.S.-backed campaign to rid the mineral-rich region of dozens of rebel groups.
A Congolese military court tried Mr. Mukulu in absentia and sentenced him to death in November 2014, after convicting him and three others for terrorism and murder, in relation to a spate of attacks inside Congo. Mr. Mukulu was put on the U.N. sanctions list in 2011 for his role in the destabilization of Congo.
