After being granted bail, award-winning Ugandan author is re-arrested

Kakwenza Rukirabashaija

Several hours after being granted bail by a court, Kakwenza Rukirabashaija has been rearrested, according to his lawyer. He was taken from prison by plainclothes men before being released and taken to an unknown destination, his lawyers allege.

A conditional bail had been offered to Ugandan writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija on Tuesday, but when his lawyer arrived at the Kitalya prison facility where he was being held, he was not there.

Eron Kiiza, Rukirabashaija's lawyer, spoke to VOA: “The prison officers didn’t have him and pointed to a car that was moving out of prison as the one that took him. And on condition of anonymity, they described it as a military SFC car and it had no number plate. And they also confiscated our bail forms,” said the lawyer.

Having been arrested at the end of December, Rukirabashaija was held incommunicado at an undisclosed location until charges of offensive communication against President Yoweri Museveni and his son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, were brought against him. 

Mathias Mpuuga, the opposition leader of Uganda, stated in a tweet that Rukirabashaija was covered in scars and other marks of torture when he visited him in prison, and the writer was limping slightly when he walked into the room. According to the writer, soldiers plucked his fingernails and other body parts with pliers, then forced him to dance nonstop while they insulted and beat him.

As far as the allegations of torture are concerned, neither the government nor the security forces have responded.

Rubirabassaija's most famous work is a novel about greed and corruption in a fictional African country widely assumed to be Uganda. Last year, he was named an "International Writer of Courage" by the PEN Pinter Prize.

* This article contains information sourced from VOA,.