By Our Correspondent,
KAMPALA Uganda
Two loud explosions rocked Uganda’s capital, Kampala, early Tuesday, sparking chaos and confusion as people fled what is widely believed to be coordinated attacks.
One blast was near a police station and another
on a street near the parliamentary building, said witnesses. The explosion near
parliament appeared to hit a building housing an insurance company and the
subsequent fire engulfed cars parked outside. Some lawmakers were seen
evacuating the precincts of the parliamentary building nearby, according to
national broadcaster UBC.
Our reporter at the parliamentary avenue, says
that three vehicles around Jubilee Building caught fire. Two police
officers could be seen lying lifeless on the ground near the blast
scene between Jubilee Tower and Queen's Chambers.
At least 24 people have been hospitalized with
injuries sustained in the blasts, Emmanuel Ainebyoona, a spokesman for the
Ministry of Health, said in a Twitter post. Four of them are critically
injured, he said.
An eyewitness video posted online showed a plume of white smoke rising from the blast scene near the police station.
Police did not immediately comment, and it was
not clear if the explosions were bomb attacks.
People are scampering to leave the city, many
on passenger motorcycles.
Ugandan officials have been urging vigilance in
the wake of a string of bomb explosions in recent weeks.
One person was killed and at least seven others
wounded in an explosion at a restaurant in a suburb of Kampala on Oct. 23.
Another explosion two days later on a passenger
bus killed only the suicide bomber, according to police.
Even before those attacks, the U.K. government
had updated its Uganda travel advisory to say extremists “are very likely to
try to carry out attacks” in this East African country.
The Allied Democratic Forces, an affiliate of
the Islamic State group in central Africa, claimed responsibility for the
attack on the eatery.
That group has long been opposed to the rule of
longtime President Yoweri Museveni, a U.S. security ally who was the first
African leader to deploy peacekeepers in Somalia to protect the federal
government from the extremist group al-Shabab. In retaliation over Uganda’s
deployment of troops to Somalia, the group carried out attacks in 2010 that
killed at least 70 people who had assembled in public places in Kampala to
watch a World Cup soccer game.
But the Allied Democratic Forces, with its
local roots, has proved more of a headache to Museveni.
The group was established in the early 1990s by
Ugandan Muslims who said they had been sidelined by Museveni’s policies. At the
time, the rebel group staged deadly terrorist attacks in Ugandan villages as
well as in the capital, including a 1998 attack in which 80 students were
massacred in a frontier town near the Congo border.
A Ugandan military assault later forced the
rebels into eastern Congo, where many rebel groups are able to roam free
because the central government has limited control there.
Reports of an alliance between the Allied
Democratic Forces and the Islamic State Group first emerged in 2019, according
to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks the online activities of extremist
organizations.
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