Locals are grappling with the immensity of Sunday’s attacks in the Ugandan capital, in which at least 74 people were killed
THERE ARE two blackboards on either side of the entrance to the casualty ward at Mulago hospital in Kampala, where the dead and injured were taken after Sunday night’s bomb blasts in the Ugandan capital. On the one to the left, the ward sister is writing the names of the 14 patients being treated inside. On the other, hanging over three patients who could not be accommodated, another message is scrawled.
“Have you confessed to Christ your Lord and Saviour?”
Even if Goutham, a 25-year-old IT manager, wanted to, he would be unable. Metal shards from the bomb blast at Ethiopian Village restaurant, where he was watching the World Cup final, have riddled his legs, chest, arms and neck.
His right leg is fractured and he is hooked up to an oxygen tank to his side. A glucose drip hangs over his tilted head, and he is on antibiotics to treat any infections that might come from the metal shards. He is one of the lucky ones. His friend is still missing.
“We can’t believe it,” says his uncle Ramnath, who drove 80km yesterday morning to get to the hospital. “Nobody expected anything like this, especially on such a day as the World Cup final. How can you kill people on such a happy occasion?”
Lying on the bed to Goutham’s left is Kasahun (20) , a flash of pain crossing his face as he raises his right leg. There are pockmarks of dried blood right down to his toes from the shrapnel that has embedded itself just above his knee. He speaks slowly, the painkillers slowing his responses.
“We were watching the football and half-time had just ended. A blast went off and then everybody dived down. We were all really confused as to what happened. I tried to get my two friends but everybody started stamping on me, trying to run away. That’s when the other bomb went off. All around me, people were bleeding. Legs, necks, eyes, they were all covered in blood,” he says. “They put me in an ambulance with another boy, but he died beside me on the way to the hospital.”
At the Ethiopian Village restaurant, where the blast that injured Kasahun and Goutham went off, a crowd has gathered to stare at the toppled patio chairs and broken beer bottles at the open-air venue.
Charred human remains, blackened by the midday sun, lie in front of what’s left of the wide-screen TV. “If you came here this morning, you would have seen body parts on the roof, the tables and chairs,” says one bystander, staring at what looks like the aftermath of a midwest twister. “They took them away in bags earlier.”
“Ugandans are really hurt by this,” says Shannon Njuki (24). She heard the blasts 3km away at a recreation centre, where she was working before the police arrived and told everyone to go home.
“We can’t understand it, because we haven’t done anything to deserve this,” she says. “On such a happy day, so many families have lost those they love for nothing.”
Unprecedented Scale Of Attack: Group With Al-qaeda Links Accepts Responsibility
WHILE UGANDAN rebel groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army have targeted civilians in the past, the scale of Sunday night’s attack is unprecedented.
Uganda’s police chief Kale Kaihura immediately blamed Somalia’s al-Shabab, which has previously carried out co-ordinated suicide attacks within the lawless Horn of Africa country.
Last night the group claimed responsibility for the attacks. This is the first time that the Shabab have struck outside Somalia, where they control most of the south of the country. The al-Qaeda- affiliated group has threatened Uganda and Burundi in the past because they contribute to the African Union peacekeeping mission in their country.
Another Shabab commander in Somalia, Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, called for militants to attacks sites in the two countries during Friday prayers last week. Uganda is also home to a large training camp for soldiers from Somalia’s transitional government, in a programme backed by the European Union and the United States.
“The attack in Kampla does bear the hallmarks of an al-Shabab action . . . the use of suicide bombers is a tactic al-Shabab have used before,” said Roger Middleton, consultant researcher with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London. There is tension within the group, he said, between those with an international jihadist outlook and those with a more nationalist view.
In December, al-Shabab bombed the graduation ceremony of Somalia’s first class of medical students in two decades, killing more than 20 people. In recent months, Al-Shabab militants have imposed a ban on watching World Cup games in the areas they control, saying the activity is “un-Islamic”. Muslims, the militants argued, should focus on holy jihad.