Besigye rejects offer to be released
By George Murumba
28th January 2013:
Retired Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) Party President Dr Kizza Besigye on Saturday stunned police officers at Kiira Road Police Station when he declined to sign the police release bond, a routine formality that has to be executed before a suspect is released on police bond.
Writing on his facebook page, FDC Youth League Leader Francis Mwijukye, who has been a loyal aide to Dr Besigye for a number of years said: “….Police was yesterday thrown into confusion after Dr Besigye refused to make a statement at police and refused to sign a police release bond.”
Mwijukye, who has himself had countless run-ins with Gen. Kayihura’s policemen, especially during the walk-to-work protests that rocked the country after the 2011 general elections, also said Dr Besigye refused to leave the police station “unless he is charged”.
Police Surrender
At about 10:00pm on Saturday night, and with no sign of a resolution to the politico-legal stalemate, all the senior police officers (perhaps acting on ‘orders from above’) started leaving the police station. Very soon, Mwijukye says, only junior officers were left at the police station.
It was at that point that Dr Besigye’s party members decided to escort him back to his home in Kasangati – a few kilometres out of the capital Kampala.
Dr Besigye, and Kampala City Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago, both of whom belong to the banned political pressure group For God and My Country (4GC), had been arrested for attempting to participate in an exercise to clean the capital city of litter.
Police officers and top government officials however insist that the two opposition politicians are hell-bent on inciting violence – and that’s why they carry out “preventive arrests” under a colonial era law to stop them causing trouble in the city.
For their part, the opposition politicians insist that they only want to exercise their constitutional and or democratic right to peacefully demonstrate against police brutality, President Museveni’s dictatorship, corruption, and alleged poisoning of government critics.
“…They (police) had been used to arresting him, (Dr Besigye) take him to the police cells, and in the evening they make him sign a statement and give him a police bond – now the game has changed. No more talking at police.” Mwijukye vowed.
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