Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni called the explosion that killed one person and wounded five on Saturday in Kampala, the capital of the East African country, the scene of attacks carried out by extremist groups, a “terrorist act”.
“It appears to be a terrorist act, but we will find the perpetrators,” Museveni wrote on Twitter.
The head of state was informed that three people left a package at the scene just before the explosion.
The attack took place Saturday night on a street lined with popular restaurants in the Kawempe neighborhood in northern Kampala.
“The population must not be afraid, we will defeat criminals as we defeat all crimes committed by these pigs that do not respect life,” added the president.
The national coronavirus curfew starts at 7 pm in Uganda, but is not uniformly adhered to.
On Oct. 8, the Islamic State (EI) extremist group claimed a bombing of a police station in Kawempe, near the site of Saturday’s explosion.
Since then, the UK and France have alerted their citizens to possible attacks and asked Uganda to watch the busiest places, including restaurants, bars and hotels.
In August, Uganda claimed to have prevented a suicide attack during the national funeral of a top army commander, Paul Lokech, who had led the fight in Somalia against al-Qaeda-linked Islamist Al Shabab rebels as commander of the Union operation. African in this country.
Lokech also participated in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an operation by the Ugandan army against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Muslim rebel group that emerged in Uganda but established a presence for nearly 30 years in the DRC, where he is accused for the death of thousands of civilians.
Uganda’s president attributed the attempted attack at General Lokech’s funeral to “ADF terrorists”.
ISIS introduces the ADF as its arm in central Africa. In March, the United States government included this group in the list of “terrorist organizations linked to ISIS”.
In July, Ugandan police arrested four suspects and killed a fifth in their investigation into the attempted assassination of Transport Minister and former army commander General Edward Katumba Wamala, an action blamed on a “terrorist cell”.
The suspects trained with the ADF in the DRC and “began to reactivate local terrorist cells” in Uganda, police said.
General Katumba Wamala was gunned down on June 1 in Kampala by hooded motorcyclists. The attack killed her daughter and one of her bodyguards.
In 2010, two attacks in Kampala against fans watching the World Cup final left 76 dead. The attacks were claimed by Al Shabab.
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