KAMPALA – Police in Kampala are investigating the source of three guns which were over the weekend found concealed in a polythene bag in Ntinda, Kampala.
The weapons, two AK47 guns, a pistol and three magazines were found abandoned by a casual labourer in a bush in minister’s village in Ntinda, Nakawa Division.
Kampala Metropolitan Police spokesman Patrick Onyango said the guns were not rusty, an indication that they were recently dropped there.
“They have serial numbers, but we don’t yet whether they belong to any security agency or illicit guns trafficked into the country. We have handed them over to the forensic directorate to analyse and get us details,” Onyango said in an interview on Sunday evening.
Mr Onyango said they have intensified patrols in the area as investigations into the motive of the owners of the guns is ongoing.
“The firearms are in good condition and the criminals who hid them must have done it recently because there was no rust on them. It is something we take seriously because we have been intensifying raids on houses of people who suspect to be illegally holding firearms,” he said.
The discovery comes amid a rising spate in armed robberies.
PML Daily has learnt that the men behind this robberies are highly trained and coordinated, which has made it difficult to apprehend them.
Hardly two weeks after armed thugs raided a hardware shop in Nansana Municipality, Wakiso District, in June, armed men killed two mobile money operators and robbed them of an unspecified amount of cash in Zzana on Entebbe Road.
Just like the Nansana robbery, the armed thugs were riding motorcycles without number plates.
Earlier, police and Internal Security Organisation had foiled a robbery by three heavily armed soldiers at Fang Fang Hotel in Nakasero in the city centre.
Security agencies also argue that sophisticated robbers are also able to beat CCTV camera surveillance using masks. In the Nansana robbery, the gunmen had masks. Government has so far spent at least Shs560 billion on the installation of CCTV cameras in Kampala and neighbouring areas.
The deployment of thousands of LDUs around Kampala and Wakiso has not done much to deter armed criminals.
President Museveni, in September last year, issued a 10-point security strategy which he assured the country would stop or eliminate the criminals.
He said government would instal CCTV cameras, introduce electronic vehicle number plates, give police officers radio calls and drones and deploy 24,000 Local Defence Unit personnel to police Kampala. Since then, 6,000 LDUs have been trained and deployed in the city centre to conduct patrols to check criminals.
According to the police 2018 crime report released recently, more than 7,000 robbery cases were registered last year, higher than the 6,850 cases reported in 2017.
A total of 2,181 cases involved the use of lethal weapons, and targeted items included motor vehicles, motorcycles and cash.
A total of Shs8b was robbed in 2018 alone, said police, who recovered Shs247m
