Controversial Buyende District Police Commander (DPC) Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Muhammed Kirumira has today ‘resigned’, to give room for police investigations into various charges that were slammed against him while he worked in Nansana, Wakiso District.
Last week ASP Kirumira was arraigned before the Police Tribunal at Police Headquarters in Naguru and charged with among other crimes torture, extortion, corruption, bribery, unlawful arrests and excessive use of authority.
He is alleged to have committed the offences when he was in-charge of Nansana Police Station in Wakiso District in 2013 and at Old Kampala where he was Division Police Commander in 2014.
In his statement as the tribunal is set to start the hearing his case tomorrow, ASP Kirumira said the police has persistently regarded him as a criminal, adding however, that the force is only trying to find ways of undermining his reputation.
‘I want to leave the police since it’s clean and I am branded dirty; this is my decision, I shall not change permanently’, Kirumira wrote, and added that the police administration decided to charge him with old and trumped up criminal charges.
Further, he vowed to hand in his official retirement application, ‘to earn my discharge letter in case court delivers its verdict’.
‘Therefore, as a senior officer who has labored to wipe out crime without any special facilitation, I have realized that my image before the administration shall never change given the fact that I am still a young man’, Kirumira added.
According to Kirumira, he now awaits handing over. ‘I now await for an official message replacing me so that I can hand over office to whoever is deemed fit’.
By press time it was not possible to contact Police spokesperson Emilian Kayima about the developments, but Kirumira’s ‘resignation’ might prove a gargantuan task, given that there are stringent laid down procedures on how one can join or leave the police force.
ASP Kirumira came to the limelight after reports emerged that he was carrying out various operations in Nansana to crack down on hard core criminals that were terrorizing Kampala.
However, sections of the populace instead implicated him in various crimes, leading the police administration to suspend him pending investigations.
His suspension was however, short-lived as the President Yoweri Museveni reportedly accorded him an ear, something that prompted his return to the force and subsequent deployment to training.
On completion of the course, ASP Kirumira was deployed to Kasese and then transferred to the Old Kampala Police Station as Officer in Charge, before being posted to Buyende as District Police Commander.
It should be recalled that while serving as DPC Old Kampala, ASP Kirumira displayed over 1000 phones he said had been stolen by criminals in his operational areas.
Interestingly, after his transfer to Buyende, nothing much was heard of the phones.
