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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Uganda police teargas opposition leader |
| 2010-10-22 |
| [Daily Nation (Kenya)] Ugandan police Thursday used teargas to prevent a group of opposition leaders, including presidential candidate Kizza Besigye, from entering the grounds of the country's election panel offices. "These people who came in and wanted to enter the electoral commission, they were causing a stampede," Grace Turyagumanawe, police deputy of director of operations, told journalists shortly after the confrontation. "The teargas which was there... was minimal," he said. Besigye and a group of supporters approached the commission's office in central Kampala early Thursday, aiming to meet election officials about preparations for the country's upcoming vote. "The reason we came here was to remind the individuals running the electoral commission that they have a non-negotiable constitutional duty to organise free and fair elections," Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda, front man for Besigye's Inter-party Cooperation said. "Instead police threw me to the ground and kicked me." Turyagumanawe said "nobody was roughed up" during the incident. Chief government spokesperson Kabakumba Masiko explained the huge security deployment outside the compound by saying "government had prior information of the (opposition's) plans." Turyagumanawe said the scuffles had broken out because Besigye and his aides had refused to be checked by police before entering the compound, but Nganda and other Besigye loyalists dismissed that explanation. |
| Posted by:Fred |