“It was around midnight and we were in my boss’s car, preparing to go home when all of a sudden men dressed in military clothes, who had come in a double cabin pickup, surrounded us,” narrates the emaciated looking Mucyo.
“They were banging on our car’s windows and ordering the boss and his wife to get out.”
Kayobera and his wife, like Mucyo, are Rwandan nationals. Mucyo says the couple ran a string of businesses in the Ugandan capital. Mucyo managed two beauty spas for them in Rubaga. He was carrying 1.3 million shillings at the time the men accosted them.
He narrates that when his boss and his wife got out of the car, the soldiers immediately snapped handcuffs on them, shoving them into the pickup. “Two of them then came back and barked at me in Swahili, “Wewe mujinga unabaki kwa gari namna gani!” (Fool, you think you will be the one to remain in this car, how?!)
Mucyo says one of them, “Gave me three hot slaps in my face while another dipped his hands in my bag, saw the money (1.3 million) and pocketed it.” Mucyo says he never got that money back, and the fellow that took it did not record it. He just stole it.
The abductors were CMI operatives, Mucyo, and the others would find out shortly.
To anyone that’s been reading about the agency’s harassment of Rwandan citizens, everything they did to Mucyo and the Kayoberas will sound familiar.
The criminal theft of money or property; the arrest by abduction – meaning abruptly and with no warning accosting victims, handcuffing them, shoving them into a vehicle, slapping hoods over their heads, all with no arrest warrant, and without telling the abductees what it is they are supposed to have done – all are hallmarks of CMI methodology.
“They shoved hoods, which are partly big hats, over the heads of all the three of us and drove off. We had no idea where they were taking us,” Mucyo narrates. He says Kayobera told the men: “If it is me you are looking for I am here; this is my wife, and this is my employee release them. There is no reason to take all of us.”
He pleaded with the CMI operatives that he and his wife had three little children back home (the three are 9, 6 and 3) who needed at least one of the parents to be with them. The men told Kayobera that was none of their business and told him to shut up.
Mucyo fell victim to CMI just because he was an employee of Darius Kayobera. The businessman, in turn, fell victim because – he is convinced – a person that he lent money to run a business, in fact, was a CMI informer.
“My boss told me, when we were in detention, that the man, called Ibrahim – a fellow Rwandan – caused problems between the two when Kayobera asked him to repay him the money he lent him,” Mucyo says. Ibrahim wrote Kayobera a check that bounced.
Kayobera through his friends learned that Ibrahim was a CMI informer. The fellow would resort to telling CMI that Kayobera was a ‘Kigali spy’. “That is how we ended up in the hands of CMI,” Mucyo shakes his head, as if still in disbelief.
One of CMI’s ways is just acting on information with zero attempts to verify it.
When the vehicle stopped they were at Mbuya, the headquarters of the agency. “We did not immediately know this place, but we would find out from other detainees that it was the CMI head office,” the weak-looking Mucyo narrates.
Other Rwandan victims of the place, such as Roger Donne Kayibanda described to this news website how once there they order one to take off his belt and shoes, and to hand over properties like wallets, watch, and portable thing. That happened to Mucyo, Kayobera and his wife.
“When one of the men saw Kayobera’s phone, he threateningly asked him for his mobile money pin code. There was 800,000 shillings on the Boss’s account and they made a transaction and withdrew the money,” Mucyo says.
“Then they took Boss’s wife away to the women’s place of detention, and then took me and Boss to a corridor, telling us that’s where we would stay!”
Mucyo describes the torture that followed. “An officer came deep in the night and barked, ‘You Mucyo, come here!’ A soldier came and shoved me upstairs – still with my hood on – and took me to what they call the statement room”. The young Rwandan says the interrogating officer told him to tell him everything about himself: where he was born, when, where he went to school, why he came to Uganda.
“I told him everything. When I was done, all of a sudden the man barked at me ‘I want you to tell me the truth, who sent you to Kampala and what did he send you to do?!”
“I said I had told him everything. “I said I only came to do business and no one sent me,” Mucyo replied. The man told the soldiers to take me downstairs, for “some special treatment”.
He narrates that two soldiers took him down into a dungeon and proceeded to beat him up, kicking and punching him, in the ribs, in the stomach everywhere. Then, he says, the men took me upstairs to another office.
“In that one, the officer spoke to me in fluent Kinyarwanda. He told me, ‘Mucyo, bite! (Hi) The only thing that will save you here is the truth! He too ordered me to tell him everything about myself. Afterwards, the man said, menacingly, “Why don’t you say the truth that it is Rwanda that sent you here?!”
Mucyo told him nothing like that happened.
“He then ordered the soldiers to come to take me ‘upstairs’”, says Mucyo.
Upstairs, there was another man, another Rwandan, Mucyo says. The two soldiers ordered me to take off my clothes. “There was a bathtub in the upstairs room, full of ice water. They told him to lie in the water, up to his neck.
Then after a few minutes, as he was shivering and shaking, they told him to step out of the tub.
Then as Mucyo watched they told the other Rwandan to sit in a metallic chair next to a wall. One of the men got hold of a couple of wires that were sticking out of a wall socket. The other ordered the Rwandan to stick his feet out. “The man with the wire suddenly shoved them onto the soles of the man’s feet.”
Mucyo says the Rwandan leaped up with a piercing scream, eyes bulging, and came thudding down on the floor. “You see that”, one of the torturers told Mucyo, “that is what happens when you do not tell the truth!”
Mucyo says they then took him downstairs, as he was shaking with fear.
He says one of his fellow prisoners, another Rwandan called Damascene Rugengamanzi, advised him to bribe an officer to save himself from further torture. Mucyo describes how he did exactly that. He called one of the officers that regularly came down the dungeons, and offered him half a million shillings.
“I gave him the contacts of my friend that stayed with me in Mengo. The officer also got me a paper and pen and I sent written instructions to my friend to give the officer the money.”
That probably saved the young man. The beatings lessened. After three months at Mbuya, CMI transferred him to its Kireka post.
The story Mucyo tells further reveals the intricate relationship between CMI and Kayumba Nyamwasa’s RNC. The officer that spoke fluent Kinyarwanda to him, Mucyo is convinced, is an RNC operative. The prisoner he was handcuffed to, Damascene, kept urging him “to tell the CMI torturers that he was ready to join Kayumba’s army”.
“That is the only thing that will save you, otherwise these men will torture you until they break your bones,” Damascene urged.
It would seem this Damascene himself must have undergone the same torture and was ready to be recruited into RNC, Mucyo thinks.
In the end, he was adamant that nothing would ever make him join the terrorists, not even death would!
Then one morning the officer I had given money appeared in the doorway of the Kireka jail and told me to step outside. They were deporting me to Rwanda.
That was this month, last Saturday on 6 April 2019. They dumped me at Kagitumba border post. On his deportation papers they had written, “illegal entry”, though he was in Uganda lawfully, he says.
“They had also robbed me of all my money, and I had nothing, But I was so thankful to be back home.”
Kayobera and Claudine still languish in CMI detention, held incommunicado, and have not been produced in court. They have not been allowed consular access. Their children have been deprived of parental care, and endure the distress of missing a mother and father.
People wonder when such lawless abductions, arrests, and torture of innocent Rwandans will ever come to an end in Uganda.
