Bartamaha (Nairobi):-The suspected mastermind of the July 11 bomb attacks in Kampala said on Thursday he was motivated by “rage against the Americans”, as he was presented to journalists by the Ugandan authorities.
Issa Ahmed Ruyima said he was a member of Somalia’s Islamist insurgent group Shebab, which has claimed responsibility for the double suicide blasts that killed 76 people on the evening of the football World Cup final.
“I joined Al Shebab in 2009,” said Ruyima, 33, who stated that he was responsible for sourcing bomb-making material, and added that he had been motivated by his “rage against the Americans”.
“I am very sorry for the loss of life that happened because of my actions,” he said.
Ruyima was among four suspects — all Ugandans — presented to the media in Kampala at a press conference where the authorities declared that all suspects in East Africa’s worst bomb attacks in nearly 12 years had been arrested.
“We promised the public that we would hunt down the perpetrators… We have kept our promise,” James Mugira, head of military intelligence, told reporters.
“We have apprehended all those responsible for the planning and execution of these cowardly attacks.”
The Shebab, who pledge allegiance to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said the blasts were intended to punish Uganda for deploying troops for the African Union forces in the Somali capital Mogadishu.
A second suspect at Thursday’s press conference, Idris Nsubuga, 30, stated that one of the suicide bombers was Kenyan and the other Somali.
He alleged that he had been recruited by Ruyima. “To be honest, I was used in this thing,” he said. “I think these people have magic spells.”
The Shebab, which controls much of southern and central Somalia, have been fighting to topple Somalia’s Western-backed interim government, which is protected by a 6,000-strong African Union force.
At a summit in Kampala two weeks after the attacks, African leaders pledged to reinforce the AU deployment by 4,000 soldiers.
The July attacks were the worst in East Africa since the August 1998 bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
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Source:-AFP.
