November 16, (THEWILL) – A twin explosion on Tuesday hit the centre of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.
One blast took place near parliament, with the other going off close to the city’s police headquarters.
The explosion near parliament appeared to hit a building housing an insurance company and the subsequent fire engulfed cars parked outside.
Some lawmakers were seen evacuating the precincts of the parliamentary building nearby, according to national broadcaster UBC.
At least 24 people have been hospitalized with injuries sustained in the blasts, Emmanuel Ainebyoona, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, said in a Twitter post. Four of them are critically injured, he added.
There are fears people may have been killed. A reporter for NTV Uganda said he saw pieces of flesh scattered on the road.
Proceedings in parliament have been called off and MPs advised not to come to the building following Tuesday’s blast.
The cause of the blast was not immediately clear but the Ugandan authorities have blamed previous bombings on Islamist militants.
Ugandan forces are part of an African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia fighting al-Shabab, an insurgent group allied to al-Qaeda.
Last month, the Islamic State group, the Allied Democratic Forces, an affiliate of the Islamic State group in Central Africa, claimed responsibility for the attack on an eatery in Kampala which killed a 20-year-old waitress.
That group has long been opposed to the rule of longtime President Yoweri Museveni, a U.S. security ally who was the first African leader to deploy peacekeepers in Somalia to protect the federal government from the extremist group al-Shabab.
In retaliation over Uganda’s deployment of troops to Somalia, the group carried out attacks in 2010 that killed at least 70 people who had assembled in public places in Kampala to watch a World Cup soccer game.
But the Allied Democratic Forces, with its local roots, has proved more of a headache to Museveni.
The group was established in the early 1990s by Ugandan Muslims who said they had been sidelined by Museveni’s policies. At the time, the rebel group staged deadly terrorist attacks in Ugandan villages as well as in the capital, including a 1998 attack in which 80 students were massacred in a frontier town near the Congo border.
A Ugandan military assault later forced the rebels into eastern Congo, where many rebel groups are able to roam free because the central government has limited control there.
Reports of an alliance between the Allied Democratic Forces and the Islamic State Group first emerged in 2019, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks the online activities of extremist organisa
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