Two young Rwandan nationals who were abducted last week by Uganda’s Military Intelligence operatives (CMI) in Western Uganda while on their way to Rwanda were repatriated home, an authoritative source confirmed to APA Friday.
The two abduscted Rwandan students were identified as Aimable Ndayishimye and Mary Kabahizi, students of Bugema University has have valid travel documents when they were arrested in Western Uganda, reports said.
The motive of the dawn raid remains unclear but hundreds of other Rwandans have been arrested in Uganda in recent years as part of what Kigali has described as hostilities against Rwanda and its citizens.
Rwanda and Uganda are both members of the six-nation East African Community bloc under which citizens from one partner state are allowed to move to another and work or settle there with relative ease.
In February last year, Ugandan and Rwandan presidents Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame held talks at the Gatuna/Katuna border to discuss the reopening of the main crossing.
The two mediators, presidents João Lourenço of Angola and Felix Tshisekedi of the DR Congo, oversaw the implementation of terms agreed upon in Luanda, the Angolan capital, in August last year.
The trigger to the rapidly escalating tensions between the two countries was a December 2018 Report of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that found that the military wing of a coalition of Rwandan opposition groups calling itself the “Platform Five,” or P5, was being armed and trained by Uganda, Burundi, and the DRC.
The P5 military forces are led by General Kayumba Nyamwasa—formerly a Ugandan senior army officer and also a former Rwandan Army Chief of Staff. The P5 has been in existence since at least 2014 and seeks to overthrow the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).
CU/abj/APA