Kampala | Friday
A UGANDAN army officer collapsed and died in southern Sudan while fleeing a rebel attack on a Sudan army unit with which he was working, army representative Major Shaban Bantariza said on Friday
Captain Kheril Magara, a representative for the Ugandan army’s northern region who was serving as a liaison officer with the Sudanese army unit, died of exhaustion on Wednesday while fleeing on foot from an attack by the Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he said.
Another Ugandan officer was unaccounted for after the incident, “but we’re still searching for him,” he said.
“When the LRA attacked the camp, they dispersed the soldiers, so Magara ran for a long distance, but collapsed on the way, where he was later found dead,” said Bantariza.
Bantariza said the officer had a history of high blood pressure.
“We have since recovered his body,” he said. “It didn’t have any bullet wound to suggest that he was killed.”
The representative said Uganda’s army would hunt down the LRA attackers. “We shall do whatever it takes. We shall get them.”
More than 100 LRA rebels were involved in attacks Wednesday on Sudanese army units at two camps, Nisitu and Jabeleni, killing an unspecified number of Sudanese soldiers.
They were the first attacks by the LRA on their former Sudanese allies since Uganda and Sudan signed a protocol agreement earlier this year allowing the Ugandan army to pursue the rebels to their bases in Sudan.
Sudan also gave Uganda up to April 2 to deploy deep inside Sudan in an effort to track down LRA leader Joseph Kony and his fighters and rescue thousands of children abducted from northern Uganda in recent years.
Kony’s LRA has been fighting President Yoweri Museveni’s secular government since 1988 to replace it with a system based on the biblical Ten Commandments.
Sudan in turn had accused Uganda of supporting John Garang’s rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which has been fighting Khartoum since 1983 to end domination of the Christian and animist south by the Arabised, Muslim north.
The two countries have recently improved ties by restoring diplomatic relations severed seven years ago. – AFP