KAMPALA (Reuters) -- Gunmen attacked and wounded Uganda’s former army commander on Tuesday, killing his daughter and driver in an assassination attempt on the general, the current minister of works and transport, an army spokeswoman and local media reports said.
Gunmen sprayed General Katumba Wamala’s car with bullets in the Kampala suburb of Kiasasi, an army spokeswoman said.
“There was a shooting involving him...he is hurt and he’s been taken to the hospital, his driver was killed,” Army spokeswoman Brigadier Flavia Byekwaso told Reuters.
Wamala’s daughter, who was in the vehicle with him was also killed, local television station NBS TV reported.
Images circulating on social media showed Katumba with his mouth open, in apparent distress outside an SUV and his light-colored trousers splattered with blood. Social media images also showed bullet holes in a car window and casings on the ground.
There has been several assassinations and mysterious deaths of high profile officials in the east African country in recent years that have fuelled speculation about perpetrators and their motivations.
Victims have involved a lawmaker, a senior police officer, the country’s top public prosecutor, senior Muslim leaders and others.
The attempt on Katumba was orchestrated in the same suburb in the capital where in 2017 gunmen on motorcycles sprayed bullets to a vehicle carrying a senior police officer. That police officer, Felix Kaweesa, was killed alongside his bodyguard and driver.
At least 55 people were killed overnight in two attacks on villages in eastern Congo, the United Nations said, in potentially the worst night of violence the area has seen in at least four years.
The army and a local civil rights group blamed the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a takfiri armed group, for raiding the village of Tchabi and a camp for displaced people near Boga, another village. Both are close to the border of Uganda.
Houses were burned and civilians abducted, the UN office for humanitarian affairs said in a statement.
The ADF is believed to have killed more than 850 people in 2020, according to the United Nations, in a spate of reprisal attacks on civilians after the army began operations against it the year before.
The ADF has in the past proclaimed allegiance to Daesh, although the United Nations says evidence linking it to other militant networks is scant.
Uganda announced earlier this month that it had agreed to share intelligence and coordinate operations against the rebels but that it would not be deploying troops in Congo.