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A hippo partially swallowed a 2-year-old in Uganda. The boy survived.

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Iga Paul was doing what most 2-year-olds do on Sunday afternoons — he was playing outside his home.

But just over 800 yards away from the toddler’s Uganda home was Lake Edward, one of the smallest bodies of water in the Great Rift Valley, where big hungry creatures reside.

On Dec. 4, a hippopotamus left the lake at about 3 p.m. local time and partially swallowed Iga in a highly unusual land attack for this area, according to Ugandan police.

A bystander who witnessed the ambush began throwing stones at the hippo in an attempt to stop the attack. Eventually, the hippo was scared off by the human assailant, spitting the young boy out before retreating back to the lake.

“It took the bravery of one Chrispas Bagonza, who was nearby, to save the victim after he stoned the hippo and scared it, causing it to release the victim from its mouth,” the Ugandan Police Force wrote in a statement.

“This is the first such kind of incident where a hippo strayed out of the Lake Edward and attacked a young child,” the police statement added.

Iga was taken to a nearby clinic for his injuries and later transferred to Bwera Hospital in west Uganda for further treatment. He was given the rabies vaccine and has since been discharged to the care of his parents, authorities said.

“Although the hippo was scared back into the lake, all residents near animal sanctuaries and habitats should know that wild animals are very dangerous,” the police statement reads. “Instinctually, wild animals see humans as a threat and any interaction can cause them to act strangely or aggressively.”

Hippos are the world’s third largest land animal and predominantly live in rivers, lakes and swamps in eastern, central and southern sub-Saharan Africa, according to Virunga National Park, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Africa, hippos kill an estimated 500 people every year, according to National Geographic, and are considered one of the world’s deadliest mammals. They are twice as deadly as lions. The probability of a hippo attack being fatal is between 29 percent and 87 percent, according to research published in 2020 from the journal Oxford Medical Case Reports.

In 2017, a Detroit woman was killed during an African safari with her family. Carol Sue Kirken, 75, was attacked by a hippo while on vacation in Tanzania, according to Detroit News. She quickly died in the arms of her son Robert, according to her obituary.

Hippo attack survivor, Kristen Yaldor, told ABC News in 2019 that a hippo pulled her underwater while she was canoeing with her husband in the Zambezi River to celebrate her 37th birthday.

The hippo took a tight grip of Yaldor’s leg and thrashed her around in the water for about 45 seconds. Yaldor said she tugged at the hippo’s mouth and it let her go. Her femur was broken and she underwent seven surgeries to repair her right leg when she returned to the United States.

“[I] didn’t have a chance to scream, it was just so quick,” Yaldor said.

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Uganda to roll out trial vaccines as it scrambles to control Ebola outbreak

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Mubende, Uganda
CNN
 — 

Joseph Singiringabo has lost almost everything and everyone he held dear to Ebola. In a few short weeks, the 78-year-old lost his wife, his son, and a newborn granddaughter to the disease.

He is left taking care of three grandchildren under 13 after their mother fled the village to escape the danger of Ebola. His livestock was stolen while he was away in the required 21-day quarantine, leaving him destitute and desperate.

“
I don’t know where they got the virus from because I went and got checked and I left the hospital without any problem with these children of mine,” he said, sitting on a log outside his modest house in Madudu, in Uganda’s central Mubende district.

“The problem I am facing now is getting food. Secondly, I never went to school, but I want these grandchildren to continue and get educated.”

Uganda is grappling with its deadliest Ebola outbreak in more than a decade, first detected in the Mubende district in late September.

The deadly disease has ravaged families, leaving authorities scrambling to control its spread.

The 2012 Ebola outbreak in the Kibaale district in the country’s western region, led to 17 deaths out of 24 confirmed cases but was declared over in less than 3 months.

Officials have launched aggressive contact tracing to track down relatives and friends who handled the bodies of first victims or attended funerals.

Some escaped from quarantine facilities, others traveled as far as the capital Kampala, and a few visited traditional healers and witchdoctors for treatment instead.

“Some of the patients are still hiding and they don’t know that they have Ebola so they’re out there in the community,” public health physician Dr. Jackson Amone told CNN.

He has been involved in every Ebola outbreak in Uganda as well as in Sierra Leone in 2017. “We need to do case investigation, a lot of contact tracing, and community engagement so that those who present with Ebola symptoms are brought for testing before we release them.”

Dr. Amone is leading the teams operating the Ebola Treatment Units in Mubende. The first was set up in a hurry on the edge of the Mubende Regional Referral Hospital.

A larger center operated by the medical non-profit Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is expanding with new ICU beds on the other side of town.

Health workers don extensive Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to enter the red zones where patients are receiving treatment.

In one zone, a health worker cradles a three-month-old baby suspected of having been infected. Her mother and another sibling are undergoing treatment for Ebola and the disease has already claimed the life of her father.

It’s a cruel welcome to the world for the infant who is wrapped in a blanket as steady rain falls on the makeshift treatment center.

It’s a familiar story across this region as Ebola spreads despite the Ugandan government’s best efforts.

“This Ebola is much easier to deal with than either corona(virus) or AIDS. The main problem here is behavior change,” President Yoweri Museveni told the nation in a Tuesday night address, stressing the need to follow the government’s procedures for those who come into contact with the disease.

Ebola can spread from person to person through direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids such as saliva, sweat, semen, or feces, or through contaminated objects like bedding or needles.

“It doesn’t spread through the air like COVID-19 and does not hide for some months before it shows itself like AIDS,” Museveni said in his televised address.

The country had so far recorded 55 deaths from Ebola, 141 confirmed cases and 73 people had recovered, he said.

Health minister Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng Ocero told CNN she expects Uganda to have the outbreak under control by April if communities cooperate with the government.

There are currently two licensed Ebola vaccines, according to the World Health Organization, but they were developed to be safe and protective against the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus.

Unlike the previous Zaire ebolavirus, the Sudan strain currently circulating in Uganda has no known effective treatment or approved vaccine. However, the country is about to roll out three trial vaccines that have been certified as safe by the World Health Organization (WHO) working group.

The WHO said the first doses would be shipped to Uganda next week and the country expects to expand the vaccine trials after reviewing results from the initial phase.

They are manufactured by the International Aids Vaccine Iniative (IAVI), the Sabin Vaccine Institute USA and a third developed by the University of Oxford and the Jenner Institute UK.

“Our further testing is about efficacy, and how long it protects. We are looking at 3,000 contacts of confirmed cases so we’ll be doing ring vaccination,” Aceng Ocero said, referring to a vaccine process that administers vaccines only to people in close contact with infected patients.

“If we have a confirmed case, then the contacts are the ones who are given the vaccine and they are followed up for 29 days because we want to see if they can quickly generate antibodies and can protect themselves from getting into full-blown disease,” Aceng Ocero added.

Public health officials believe that cases are stabilizing due to increased vigilance, but tradition and religion are holding back progress. One community in Kassanda district, central Uganda, exhumed a body that had been buried safely by health workers to perform religious rites.

It led to “an explosion of over 41 cases within 5 days and 10 deaths,” President Museveni said in his address. He has now barred traditional healers and witchdoctors from taking clients during the Ebola outbreak.

Infections are also rising as it is hard to keep people apart in close-knit communal settings. Robert Twinamasiko, a 30-year-old driver is undergoing treatment after he helped an infected friend to an ambulance. The friend and one other person involved both died.

Twinamasiko has spent 17 days in hospital but says he has no regrets. Although he looked frail, he was making a recovery and told CNN he was looking forward to going home.

“I’m just waiting for my blood work to be discharged but the world out there should know that Ebola is real,” he said from inside a red zone.

Uganda is also trying to contain the spread of the disease by closing the school term early to avoid an outbreak of Ebola in schools which could be hard to manage. “If you have one learner in a class testing positive, the entire class has to undergo quarantine. But also, you will not be 100% sure that that learner did not have contact with other learners outside that class,” Minister Aceng Ocero explained.

She said she was frustrated that Uganda wasn’t getting enough credit internationally for managing the Ebola crisis. “We have experience. This is our eighth Ebola outbreak. Every time we get an outbreak, our experience increases,” she said.

Some global health experts have criticized Uganda’s initial response to the outbreak as slow and inept. Some partners in the donor and diplomatic community have also bristled about how much information Ugandan authorities are sharing with them.



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Uganda Reopens Schools After World’s Longest Covid Shutdown

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KAMPALA, Uganda — Uganda reopened its schools on Monday after the longest pandemic-prompted shutdown in the world, but educators and others say that the closing has taken a lasting toll, eroding decades of classroom gains in the East African nation.

Despite efforts at remote education, more than half of Uganda’s students effectively stopped learning after the government ordered classrooms closed in March 2020, a government agency has found.

And the outlook is not optimistic: Up to a third of students, many of whom took jobs during the pandemic to support their struggling families, may not return to the classroom. Thousands of schools, themselves under financial stress, are not expected to reopen their doors. And countless teachers will not come back either, having turned to other work after losing their income during the shutdown.

“The damage is extremely big,” said Mary Goretti Nakabugo, the executive director of Uwezo Uganda, a Uganda-based nonprofit that conducts educational research. Unless there are intensive efforts to help students catch up, she said, “we may have lost a generation.”

Among that generation is Kauthara Shadiah Nabasitu, 15, who has abandoned plans to continue her education in high school. Though elementary education in Uganda is free and is intended to be compulsory, high school education is discretionary and tuition-based.

“I am a person who wants to study,” said Ms. Nabasitu, 15, who started selling juice and braiding hair in the low-income Kamwokya neighborhood of Kampala to help her family during the shutdown.

It was important, though, Ms. Nabasitu said, for her to “help my mom with the burdens that she carries.” Her mother, a vegetable seller, told her that she would not be able to pay for her high school education, Ms. Nabasitu added.

Ms. Nabasitu said that she missed the safety and sense of community that school offered, a loss felt by her friends as well. During the pandemic, she said, some friends became pregnant and won’t return to school either.

Many countries closed schools on and off over the past two years, but only six nations — the Bahamas, Belize, Brunei, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines are the others — have continued to impose nationwide closures, according to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Uganda’s shutdown, instituted shortly after the first Covid cases were detected in the country, was the longest of all, UNESCO said — affecting 10.4 million students — and the duration has been the subject of debate, domestically and internationally.

“Our call during Covid has been that schools should be the last to close and the first to open,” said Robert Jenkins, global director of education at the United Nations Children’s Fund. “In the case of Uganda, the scale and the duration have been unprecedented.”

Janet Museveni, the Ugandan minister of education and the wife of President Yoweri Museveni, said that the shutdown had been introduced to curb the risk of children spreading the virus to their parents. The children, she said, “would become orphans — just like H.I.V./AIDS did to many of the families.”

Critics and opposition figures contend that officials used Covid as a pretext to impose especially stringent lockdown rules intended to suppress dissent ahead of the January 2021 elections and in the many violent and tense months that followed. The government is now simply more confident that it is in control, they argue, allowing it to turn its attention to reopening the economy.

Although vaccination rates in the total population are low overall — single digits percentage-wise — the authorities say that most teachers are now inoculated, which enables them to reopen classrooms. Still, the reopening — bars and concert venues will follow in two weeks — comes amid a fourth wave of the pandemic that has led to a nearly 200 percent rise in cases over the past 14 days.

“We believe this time Covid will not scare us,” Joyce Moriku Kaducu, the state minister for primary education, said in an interview. She disputed any notion that young people’s education had been sacrificed.

“I don’t accept that there is a lost generation,” Dr. Kaducu said. “What I agree to is there’s a percentage of our children who have gotten pregnant, the young boys have gotten into the moneymaking economy and others have gone into things. That does not mean that we have lost the generation completely.”

Still, even the government’s own data shows that the nearly two-year interruption in classroom lessons took a heavy toll on students, particularly those from poor and rural communities.

Education officials introduced remote lessons via television, radio and the internet, but many households do not have ready access to electronic devices or electricity, and are led by parents with limited education themselves, hindering their ability to help their children.

As a result, 51 percent of students stopped learning when the schools closed, according to a report by the National Planning Authority, a government agency, and as many as a third may not return to the classroom now.

Many teachers will not come back either.

Ariiho Ambrose, 29, taught mathematics and science at an elementary school in Wakiso District in the Central Region of Uganda, making $110 a month.

But after the pandemic hit, he was paid only a month’s salary, pushing him to find an alternative to support his wife and two children. He finally landed a job with a telecommunications company, where he says he works fewer hours and is paid more, up to $180 a month.

Though the school wants him to return, he has declined. “I will miss teaching children,” he said.

Some students and teachers who aim to return might not find their schools open. The national planning agency said that 3,507 elementary and 832 high schools nationwide might not reopen on Monday and were likely to remain permanently closed. Uganda has a mix of government-run schools and private ones owned by individuals or religious organizations.

The closings, educators say, threaten to undo decades of educational progress in Uganda, which was one of the first African countries to offer free elementary school education, in 1997. That effort, funded by donors, lifted enrollment, recruited teachers and led to the construction of schools.

St. Divine Community Nursery School in Kampala, which once had 220 students and eight teachers, is among those that will not reopen. Its owner, Joshua Twinamatsiko, had to close the school six months after the shutdown because he couldn’t afford the $425 monthly rent. He lost an investment of about $8,500, he said.

“It has been challenging for me to see all my efforts and money go to waste,” Mr. Twinamatsiko said in an interview.

Now, after nearly two years of caution, the government is pushing to get as many students as possible back to school. The authorities have enlisted village elders and church leaders to encourage families to re-enroll their children. Covid testing of students is not required to return to the classroom, and Ms. Museveni, the education minister, has warned school officials not to impose excessive tuition or fees.

Some of the reopening measures could be reversed, Mr. Museveni, the president, said, if the health care system becomes overwhelmed.

David Atwiine, 15, hopes that will not be the case. He started selling masks in the streets of Kampala after the shutdown was imposed, making $5 on a good day. But no amount of money, he said, will stop him from seeking the education he sees as necessary to succeed.

“I must return to school and study,” he said.



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Uganda reopens schools after long COVID-19 shutdown

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The tale of the two friends — one a dropout, one joyfully resuming her education – is also the tale of millions of Uganda’s children as many went back to classes on Monday after a nearly two-year shutdown of schools induced by Covid-19.

The shutdown in the east African country was the longest disruption of educational institutions globally due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the United Nations.

When the closure went into effect, 15.5 million students had their education disrupted, according to Dennis Mugimba, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Education.

Universities and higher education students had returned to school in a phased manner, but kindergarten and lower primary students, approximately six million students, hadn’t stepped in a classroom until today, said Mugimba.

“I am excited that I am going back to school. It has not been easy for me to keep safe at home for this long but I thank God, who has kept me safe,” 16-year-old Rachael told Reuters.

“I have all along longed to go back to school so that I can achieve my dream career of becoming an accountant.”

‘A necessary closure’

But Ugandan officials expect a third of children who were in school when the pandemic began will not return, which could prove a heavy blow to the future prospects of the new generation in a country with one of the world’s youngest populations and already struggling with high unemployment and poverty.

The long closure was necessary to protect children and their families as Uganda tried to curb the spread of Covid-19, Janet Museveni, Uganda’s first lady and Minister of Education said in a statement last September.

“We choose to be patient and continue to vaccinate our teachers, learners above 18 years of age and the vulnerable population so that we can be confident enough that we have given some protection to a critical mass of our population,” Museveni said.

There will be a learning curve for students and educators to get back on track, especially for large swathes of students who had to abandon their studies over the last two years out of a lack of resources or supervision for remote learning, Mugimba acknowledged.

Six-year-old learners will automatically be placed in grade one, regardless if they’ve gone through kindergarten or not. Students will also be taught an abridged curriculum with remedial lessons, he said. Under that plan, the hope is that students will be able to catch up in two to three years time.

The school closures, alongside other strict measures to stem the spread of the virus, helped keep the number of Covid-19 deaths low in Uganda. The country has so far recorded around 153,000 cases of Covid-19 and about 3,300 deaths.

But the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF says the shutdown was too long and costly for Uganda’s young.

“Millions of children are at the risk of losing the right to education,” said Munir Safieldin, UNICEF’s Uganda country representative. He cited a state planning authority projection that a third of students would never return to school.

Teen pregnancies

A substantial number of those students will not return to school due to early pregnancy and child labor after having been out of classrooms for so long, especially learners from low-income families or rural areas, said Dr Joseph Muvawala, the executive director of the National Planning Authority (NPA), a government agency. The NPA estimates up to a third of students may not return.

Mugimba refuted that figure as being overinflated, saying it’s “apocalyptic.”

He contends the true number won’t be nearly as high as that, but “every fish you manage to throw back in the water does matter and we do know that problem is there,” Mugimba told CNN.

Rachael’s friend Fridah was not among the crowds of young students flocking back to classes on Monday.

Fridah was Rachael’s age when classes closed. Though she loved biology and chemistry and dreamt of becoming a doctor, she said she “buried” that dream to help support her family by finding a job. Uganda’s strict Covid-19 lockdown pushed many families deeper into poverty as people working odd jobs were left without income.

Now Fridah fears for her future.

“I am worried as a girl. Without being in school I might be tempted to get married,” she said as she waited tables.

“I am here working but I know my friends right now are going back to school or preparing to. That thought sucks the energy out of me. I feel some despair and anger.”

Another 16-year-old in the town of Kayunga, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of the capital Kampala, told Reuters she fell prey to the same temptation while schools were shuttered.

Sara Nakafero said she was bored and stuck at home when she was lured by an older man into a relationship.

Weeks later, her grandmother forced her to take a pregnancy test. She said she spent her pregnancy crying frequently.

The petite teenager now avoids leaving her grandmother’s home with her three-month-old infant Sumin due to prying neighbors. “People stare at me…Whenever I walk around or when I go for immunization, people ask me, ‘Is this child really yours?’,” Nakafero said.

“I feel embarrassed. I feel anger,” she said.

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Congo says it has to fight joint enemy with Uganda as soldiers cross border

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Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) soldiers rest next to a road after Islamist rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) attacked area around Mukoko village, North Kivu province of Democratic Republic of Congo, December 11, 2018. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic/File Photo

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BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Congolese authorities on Wednesday sought to allay concerns about the arrival of Ugandan troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for an ongoing joint operation against a militia linked to Islamic State.

Witnesses saw hundreds of Ugandan soldiers entering Congo as both countries deployed special forces to secure bases of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia that they had hit with air and artillery strikes the previous day. read more

Government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya said the countries were cooperating against a common enemy. The ADF are accused of killing hundreds of civilians in eastern Congo since 2019 and carrying out a string of recent bombings in Uganda.

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“We know it is an operation that some of our fellow citizens have doubts about for good reasons,” he told a news conference in the Kinshasa. “Both we and Uganda have an obligation to act together.”

The move has provoked unease in both capitals because of the Ugandan army’s conduct during Congo’s 1998-2003 civil war, for which Kinshasa is seeking billions of dollars of reparations. Uganda has called the amount ruinous. read more

Army spokesman Leon-Richard Kasonga declined to say how many Ugandan troops were in Congo, how long the joint mission would last, or what toll had been exacted on the ADF.

“Patience,” he told the briefing. “We’ve just started.”

President Felix Tshisekedi had for months lobbied neighbours for help. His own efforts to end decades of bloodshed in Congo’s east have been stymied by poor planning, corruption and insufficient funding, according to a parliamentary report. read more

“I have just seen 30 vehicles full of Ugandan soldiers entering Congo. I also saw two tanks,” said Nobili resident Blaise Bokassa. Another witness, a civil rights activist, said he had seen “many vehicles with hundreds of Ugandan soldiers”.

A Ugandan army spokesperson said she could not immediately comment.

Nelleke Van de Walle, from the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said the operation appeared to be more ambitious than the last time Uganda attacked the ADF in Congo, in 2017, when it said it had killed 100 fighters in air strikes.

Ugandan opposition lawmaker Joel Ssenyonyi said the government should have sought parliamentary permission for the deployment.

“We fear we could see the same illegal activities that happened during the past deployment – stealing gold and those other commodities.”

The ADF, which started as an uprising in Uganda but has been based in Congo since the late 1990s, pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2019. However, United Nations researchers have found no evidence of Islamic State control over ADF operations. read more

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Reporting by Erikas Mwisi Kambale, Elias Biryabarema, Hereward Holland and Alessandra Prentice; Writing by Hereward Holland and Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Angus MacSwan

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Uganda police kill five men after suicide bombings, including Muslim cleric | Uganda

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Ugandan authorities have killed at least five people, including a Muslim cleric, accused of having ties to the extremist group responsible for Tuesday’s suicide bombings in the capital.

Four men were killed in a shootout in a frontier town near the western border with Congo as they tried to cross back into Uganda, police said on Thursday. A fifth man, a cleric named Muhammad Kirevu, was killed in “a violent confrontation” when security forces raided his home outside Kampala, police spokesperson Fred Enanga said.

A second cleric, Suleiman Nsubuga, is the subject of a manhunt, he said, accusing the two clerics of radicalising young Muslim men and encouraging them to join underground cells to carry out violent attacks.

The police raids come after the explosions on Tuesday in which at least four civilians were killed when suicide bombers detonated their explosives at two locations in Kampala. One attack happened near the parliamentary building and the second near a busy police station. The attacks sparked chaos and confusion in the city as well as outpourings of concern from the international community.

A total of 21 suspects with alleged links to the perpetrators are in custody, Enanga said.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s explosions, saying they were carried out by Ugandans. Authorities blamed the attacks on the Allied Democratic Forces, or ADF, an extremist group that has been allied with IS since 2019.

President Yoweri Museveni identified the alleged suicide bombers in a statement in which he warned that security forces were “coming for” alleged members of the ADF.

While Ugandan authorities are under pressure to show they are in control of the situation, the killings of suspects raise fears of a crackdown in which innocent people will become victims.

Despite the horror of the bomb attacks, “it remains critical to ensure no terrorist attack translates into a blank check to violate human rights under a pretext of fighting terror”, said Maria Burnett, a rights lawyer with the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

“Across east Africa, terrorism has been a pretext at times to ensnare political opponents, civic actors, and even refugees seeking protection,” she said. “Such actions risk radicalising people in support of non-state actors and hands those actors an easy propaganda tool.”

Human Rights Watch has previously documented cases in which Ugandan security have allegedly tortured ADF suspects and held them without trial for long periods.

The ADF has for years been opposed to the long rule of Museveni, a US security ally who was the first African leader to deploy peacekeepers in Somalia to protect the federal government from the extremist group al-Shabaab.

In retaliation over Uganda’s deployment of troops to Somalia, that group carried out attacks in 2010 that killed at least 70 people who had assembled in public places in Kampala to watch the football World Cup final.

But the ADF, with its local roots, has become a more pressing challenge to Museveni, 77, who has ruled Uganda for 35 years and was reelected to a five-year term in January.

The group was established in the early 1990s by some Ugandan Muslims, who said they had been sidelined by Museveni’s policies. At the time, the rebel group staged deadly attacks in Ugandan villages as well as in the capital, including a 1998 attack in which 80 students were massacred in a town near the Congo border.

A Ugandan military assault later forced the rebels into eastern Congo, where many rebel groups are able to roam free because the central government has limited control there.

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Uganda bombings: Islamic State claims responsibility for Kampala suicide attacks

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Two civilians and a police officer were killed in the blasts, police spokesperson Fred Enanga told reporters at a news conference in the city.

The ISIS-affiliated Amaq News Agency reported the incident on its Telegram channel on Tuesday, saying three fighters set out with bags loaded with explosives. Two headed toward the Kampala Central Police Station, and the third to the parliament building, where they detonated, it reported.

Police said the attacks bore the hallmarks of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist rebel group affiliated with ISIS.

In a statement on Tuesday, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni raised the number of people injured from 33 to 36. He said three attackers died while detonating their bombs and seven were killed while resisting arrest. A total of 81 suspects have been arrested, Museveni said.

“Apart from hunting the terrorists, the country’s strategy of vigilance (alertness), is helping to minimize damage,” Museveni said.

“Therefore, the public should maintain vigilance of checking people at entry points to bus parks, hotels, churches, mosques, markets,” he added.

The two explosions rocked the city center within five minutes of each other. Police said surveillance footage showed an adult male carrying a backpack detonating himself at 10:03 a.m. local time near the Central Police Station. Enanga said the attacker died instantly.

Two people were confirmed dead at the scene of the first blast, while 17 others sustained critical injuries, Enanga said in a statement.

Three minutes after the first explosion, two suicide bombers on motorcycles were seen detonating themselves near Raja Chambers and Jubilee Insurance Building along the central Kampala Parliament Avenue, Enanga said. The two bombers died and the body of a civilian was also found at the site, he added.

Enanga said 33 people were injured in the two blasts; five of them are in critical condition. The wounded are being treated at the Mulago National Referral Hospital.

Police pursued a fourth bomber, Enanga said, adding that two further bombs were recovered from his home that will be detonated safely.

Following the bombings, police and army personnel cordoned off streets around the blast sites and restricted traffic in the city.

Last month, an explosion in Kampala killed at least one person and injured several others. Reuters reported that the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for that blast.

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Uganda explosions: At least two blasts rock capital Kampala

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One blast went off near the Central Police Station and another near Parliament. The cause of the explosions was not immediately clear and no group has claimed responsibility.

The first explosion occurred at about 10 a.m. local time on Kampala’s Buganda Road, according to the journalist at the scene.

Ugandan state minister Kabbyanga Godfrey Baluku Kiime tweeted about the explosion, saying: “There has been a bomb blast at the headquarters of [the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology and National Guidance]. All of us are safe. A few colleagues were hurt by flying window glasses and debris.”

Police and army personnel cordoned off streets around the blast site and several ambulances were deployed.

Images on social media showed several people lying on the streets near the entrance of Central Police Station and Kampala’s High Court, though there is no clarity on the numbers of dead or injured at this point.

At Parliamentary Avenue, where the second explosion occurred, all streets have been cordoned off by security, with legislators and parliamentary staff evacuated.

Last month, an explosion in Kampala killed at least one person and injured several others. Reuters reported that the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for that blast.

This is a developing story, more to come.



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Sports

Missing Ugandan Weightlifter Julius Ssekitoleko Left Note Saying He Wants to Live in Tokyo

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Ugandan weightlifter Julius Ssekitoleko failed to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics this week. Then, on Friday, he disappeared.

A note has been discovered, CNN reports, written by the 20-year-old insisting he went missing on purpose and does not want to return to his home country because life there is too difficult.

Ssekitoleko reportedly asked that his belongings be sent home to his wife. His whereabouts are still unknown, but CNN and local reports confirm Ssekitoleko bought a bullet train ticket to the city of Nagoya after last being seen early Friday morning near his hotel. Nagoya is just under two hours from Tokyo by bullet train.

The Japanese news agency Kyodo reports that Ssekitoleko wrote “a note to the effect of ‘I want to work in Japan,’” before leaving. He also missed a scheduled COVID test before bailing.

Beatrice Ayikoru, the chef de mission of the Ugandan delegation, told Kyodo that they were working closely with Japanese officials. “We, during our regular team briefings both in Uganda and in Japan, emphasized inter alia the need to respect the immigration regulations of Japan and not opt to leave the camp without authorization,” she said.

The New York Times reported that two members of the Ugandan Olympic delegation tested positive for the coronavirus last month. While the Olympic Village just announced its first coronavirus case, 44 people affiliated with the Olympics have come down with the virus since athletes, press, and staff began arriving in Tokyo for preparation.

Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency amid rising case numbers and widespread protests against the games. The Olympics begin on July 23.

Ssekitoleko finished tenth in the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Australia. At those Games, hundreds of athletes tried to claim asylum in Australia once the event was over but they were later rejected. Two rugby players from Uganda went missing after competing in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Scotland, and were later granted asylum.

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Europe pause of AstraZeneca sends ripple of doubt elsewhere

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KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — The suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in several European countries over the past week could fuel skepticism about the shot far beyond their shores, potentially threatening the rollout of a vaccine that is key to the global strategy to stamp out the coronavirus pandemic, especially in developing nations.

As things stand, it’s either AstraZeneca or nothing for some poorer countries. The vaccine from the Anglo-Swedish drug maker is cheaper and easier to store than many others. It will make up nearly all of the doses shipped in the first half of the year by COVAX, a consortium meant to ensure low- and middle-income countries receive vaccines.

With little other choice, most developing countries that had the AstraZeneca on hand pushed ahead with it even as major countries in Europe suspended its use over the past week after reports that unusual blood clots were found in some recipients of the shot — despite insistence from international health agencies that there was no evidence the vaccine was responsible.

But while governments in Africa and elsewhere expressed their determination to continue using the shot, not everyone is convinced.

“Why should I allow it to be used on me? Are we not human beings like those in Europe?” Peter Odongo, a resident of a town in northern Uganda, told the Daily Monitor newspaper this week.

The East African country has received 864,000 AstraZeneca doses via COVAX so far but had administered fewer than 3,000 by Tuesday. Authorities blamed logistical challenges in transporting the vaccines deep into the country, but newspaper reports cite resistance to the vaccine.

Even before the latest debate over AstraZeneca, vaccine skepticism had been a concern across the world, as many people are hesitant about shots developed in record time. African countries have faced particular hurdles on a continent wary of being a testing ground for the West. Some leaders have pushed back against skepticism, while others, such as those in Burundi and Tanzania, have fed it by appearing to deny the seriousness of COVID-19.

“Unfortunate events” in Europe will ”clearly not be helpful for our public confidence, in building public confidence and trust on the use of that particular vaccine and other vaccines for sure,” John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday, as he encouraged African countries to continue their vaccinations.

That came hours before the European Union drug regulator gave the same message to its 27 members. The European Medicines Agency said its experts concluded that the vaccine is not linked to an overall increase in the risk of blood clots, though it could not definitively rule out a link to rare types of clots and the vaccine. In response, countries including Italy, France and Germany announced they would resume use of the shot.

Even before those reversals, several developing nations had said they would stick by the shot.

“We will continue the inoculations,” said Lia Tadesse, health minister of Ethiopia, which received 2.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week.

Authorities in India — home to the vaccine manufacturer that will likely make a large portion of the doses destined for the developing world — said Wednesday they would continue AstraZeneca inoculations with “full vigor” as infections jumped in several parts of the country. After initially saying it would delay use of the vaccine, Thailand said Tuesday it would carry on with AstraZeneca, and the prime minister even got his shot in public.

Brazil’s state-run Fiocruz institute delivered the first AstraZeneca shots bottled in Brazil on Wednesday as the Health Ministry sought to allay concerns about the blood clot reports, urging calm.

Very few developing countries bucked the trend. Congo, for instance, halted use of AstraZeneca, putting its vaccination campaign on hold even before it began since it has no doses of anything else. Indonesia also initially paused the shot but then said Friday it would resume using it.

European and other wealthy countries have several vaccines to choose from, but AstraZeneca is currently the linchpin in the strategy to vaccinate the rest of the world. Some developing countries have received doses of Chinese-made or Russian-made vaccines — often as donations — but, at least in Africa, these allotments have usually been relatively small. The Chinese and Russian vaccines have not yet been endorsed by WHO and so cannot be distributed by COVAX.

Africa, with a population of 1.3 billion, hopes to vaccinate 60% of its people by the end of 2022. That target almost certainly will not be met without widespread use of AstraZeneca. And experts have warned that until vaccinations rates are high the world over, the virus remains a threat everywhere.

The eroding confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine only compounds the difficulties Africa will face in rolling out their inoculation campaigns. The continent is home to some of the world’s weakest health systems. Nations there have struggled just to test enough people for the coronavirus, and the actual toll is unknown because of challenges in tracking cases and deaths. According to the Africa CDC, more than 4 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed across the continent, including over 108,000 deaths.

In an analysis released Thursday, the World Bank found that 85% of low- and middle-income countries had a plan to vaccinate but less than a third had public engagement strategies to combat hesitancy and misinformation about vaccines.

That means confusion like that caused by the pause in AstraZeneca across Europe can be hard to iron out.

“It complicates the situation,” said Dr. Misaki Wayengera, head of a technical taskforce that’s advising Uganda’s pandemic response, referring to the suspension. “It’s the best shot we have here, and we should be able to take it.”

The blow to public confidence was felt in countries such as Somalia, which began vaccinations on Tuesday, but where some said they were not keen on getting the AstraZeneca shot while many in Europe weren’t using it.

“This immunization does not make any sense when the countries in EU” have suspended its use, said Abdulkadir Osman. “We cannot simply trust it.”

In Rwanda, which received 240,000 AstraZeneca doses and just over 102,000 of the Pfizer vaccine, Justin Gatsinzi said he was initially reluctant to get the shot but relented out of fear he would be denied some public services if he refused.

“It’s very tricky actually,” said Gatsinzi, a teacher, adding that he was not told which vaccine he got.

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Associated Press journalists David Biller in Rio de Janeiro, Ignatius Ssuuna in Kigali, Rwanda, Ashok Sharma in New Delhi, Mohamed Sheikh Nor in Mogadishu, Somalia, Lori Hinnant in Paris and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

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