International ‘Amin family flown to Iraq’— but hunt for Idi still on

Press, 14 April 1979, Page 8

International ‘Amin family flown to Iraq’— but hunt for Idi still on

NZPA-Reuter ' Nairobi Uganda's Idi Amin was a hunted man yesterday in the land he ruled by terror for eight years.

“He deserves the gallows,”, said a broadcast by the country’s new rulers, who with Tanzanian troops captured the capital of Kampala on Wednesday. The broadcast accused Field-Marshal Amin of killi ing up to half a million i people since he took power !in a 1971 coup. The radio called on Ugandans to hunt him down “wherever he is.” The director of the United States central Intelligence Agency (Mr Stansfield Turner) yesterday said, in Washington that the family of Field-Marshal Amin was in Iraq. Speaking at an overseas writer’s lunch. Mr Turner said: “Whether he’ll go to join them, I don’t know.”

The whereabouts of FieldMarshal Arnin himself are still a mystery. Monitors in Nairobi said they had heard a broadcast on Tuesday which had definitely been made by Field-Marshal Amin.

Radio experts said the transmitter was in the north-eastern Uganda town of Soroti. But they said the Field-Marshal could have used a mobile transmitter stationed anywhere in northern Uganda and linked with Soroti.

During his tenure as Ugandan “President-for-life” he survived 20 assassination attempts, one of them involving a grenade that bounced off his cheek. An official in the east Uganda town of Mbale, where the Tanzanian-led force of returned Ugandan exiles has not yet penetrated, said he did not know if Field-Marshal Amin had passed through on his way to refuge in his tribal homeland.

“We do not know. He travels by night,” the official said by telephone from the town astride the main highway on the road from Kampala to the far northwest near the border with Sudan and Zaire. The Tanzanian-backed forces that captured Kampala hold about a third of the country.

In the rest of Uganda, administration is collapsing and lawless bands of the F i e 1 d-Marshal’s defeated troops roam the countryside. Diplomats said the demoralised soldiers seemed in no state to mount a counterattack, but Field-Marshal Amin might rally hard-core loyalists to hold out in the West Nile home of his

Kakwa tribe while he plotted his next move. Uganda’s new interim Government, proclaimed in Dar-es-Salaam on Wednesday, on Thursday, gave the remnants of Field-Marshal Amin’s 20,000-man army until yesterday to surrender. In Kampala the new authorities freed 4000 people' from the city’s prisons, notorious as sites of torture chambers and execution cells where people were hacked to death or had their theiri skulls smashed with sledge hammers. loose freed included teen agers accused of subversior and a MiG-jet pilot who hac refused to fly and who was to die this week. Military chiefs of the new Government were in Kam pala, but President Yusuft Lule, aged 67, and his Minis ters had yet to fly in iron exile in Tanzania. They hac been delayed by bac weather.

Two dozen anti-Amin Ugandans have taken over their country’s embassy in Washington 'as the United States State Department disclosed that representatives of Ugandan insurgents now in control of Kampala had met United States officials last week.