{{The wanted deputy of Uganda’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, Okot Odhiambo (pictured above), may have been killed in recent fighting, the Ugandan defence minister told media on Friday.}}
Odhiambo was indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2005 along with LRA chief Joseph Kony and fellow rebel Dominic Ongwen on charges of butchering and kidnapping civilians.
“There are pointers from defectors that Okot Odhiambo may be dead,” Defence Minister Crispus Kiyonga told reporters Friday.
“Our forces are verifying these reports to check if indeed he died in the battles we have had with them and a position will be communicated,” Kiyonga said.
According to the ICC warrant, former LRA members describe Odhiambo as a “ruthless killer” and “the one who killed the most”.
Odhiambo is widely suspected to have directed the killing of some 300 civilians during a February 2004 attack on the Barlonyo internally displaced persons camp in northern Uganda, one of the single largest massacres in the LRA’s brutal history.
After Odhiambo reportedly ordered the rebels to “kill every living thing”, witnesses say camp residents were burnt alive in their homes, hacked to death with machetes, stabbed, bludgeoned and shot as they tried to escape.
NV
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