The New year was not good for the family of award-winning Ugandan author “Kakwenza Rukirabashaija. On December 28, he got arrested, but it was not immediately clear who captured him, according to his statement on his Facebook page.
He said men with guns were breaking his door. They say they are policemen, but they were not in their uniform. He locked himself and posted himself on his Facebook page.
After almost one week of his arrest, Kakwenza Rukirabashaija made a surprise visit with police officers. Who came to the writer’s house for further investigation.
The wife of an award-winning Ugandan author didn’t see or hear him after his arrest last week. After almost a week, when he saw her husband again on Monday, Eva Basiima was left shocked to see his husband’s condition.
According to his wife, the 33-year-old novelist and winner of the prestigious 2021 PEN Pinter displayed visible signs of torture.
She further said he was in such a bad state she broke down after seeing her husband condition.
According to research, his wife said in an interview that his husband’s legs were swollen, and he looked starved. He tried to show me his feet. There was a deep cut under his feet, his soles. He was precisely in the same clothes he wore when he got arrested on December 28.
Security officers researched the house for nearly three hours, overturning everything, disturbing the couple’s three children, and permitting his husband to use the toilet. He further granted permission to shower but under the presence of an officer in the bathroom since he looked like he didn’t shower for a week and even brushed his teeth nearly a week.
“He refreshed himself and left his clothes in the bathroom. After he left his clothes in the bathroom, I saw them filled with dry bloodstains. I took them and kept them as evidence,” explained Basiima.
Within hours, images of her husband clothes got viral on Twitter, with the message alerting the International community. On Monday, author lawyer “Rukirabasaija’s” lawyer Eron Kiiza posted photographs of the clothes.
However, his wife didn’t get permission to talk to her husband privately.
This is the third time the author got arrested within two years, and every arrest, they tortured him.
Last year he was detained and questioned about his novel “The Greedy Barbarian”, which spread high-level corruption in the nation.
After his release, he wrote in another book of his torture in jail, “Banana Republic: where writing is Treasonous”. Last year in September 2020, he was arrested again because of his second novel.
