The deputy head of Jamatil Salafiya Tabliq Muslim sect, Sheikh Yahya Mwanje has been released. Sheikh Mwanje was released on police bond pending investigations.
The release followed the Muslim Parliamentary Caucus meeting which demanded his unconditional release. The MPs demanded that Sheikh Mwanje be brought to court, and also that their families, doctors and lawyers should be allowed to see them.
Sheikh Mwanje was last week abducted from Nakasero Mosque. The abductors picked him up from the entrance of the mosque and bundled him into the waiting Toyota Hiace commonly known as a drone.
He has been held at Chief of Military Intelligence (CMI) since November 28, 2022. In tandem, security operatives picked another Muslim cleric from Mbale, Mansa Musa. He is suspected to be detained in an unrevealed place in Kampala.
“We are deeply concerned about those arrests,” Bugiri Municipality MP Asuman Basalirwa said adding that, “the mode of an arrest does not befit the status of religious leaders. You would have expected the police or any security agency to summon those religious leaders.”
He wondered why the religious leaders are picked without following the legal process and detained incommunicado.
“That is illegal and unconstitutional. We protest the kind of treatment that our religious leaders are being subjected to. We are also concerned that up to now, Sheikh Yahya Mwanje has not been produced before courts of law,” he said.
