It began on Sunday afternoon. Chris Munnion of the Daily Telegraph, John Harrison of the Daily Express, and myself had been out to lunch with friends. We returned to our hotel to find armed police on the door but with hotel guests coming and going among them. We collected our room keys and I was in the lift when a police officer, rifle in hand, shouted ╥Get out!╙
He told us to sit down in the hotel foyer, with an armed police constable as guard. After half an hour or so of waiting, with hotel guests strolling by on their way to the swimming pool, we were taken up to our hotel rooms by a group of uniformed police and plain clothes men.
Each of us had our rooms searched, and various documents ╤ straightforward published information about Uganda ╤ impounded. Each was told to pack his bags and then taken down by the police and told to settle our hotel bill. By this time Donald McCullin had joined us.
With our suitcases and typewriters we were driven down to the Central Police Station in Kampala. There was a long wait with police attempting to go through the standard procedure of booking in people who had been arrested. At one point a police officer shouted: ╥It is the President╒s order that every European found on the streets ╤ doctors or teachers or anyone ╤ must be taken to Makindye!╙
Makindye is the military prison on one of the seven hills that form the rim of Kampala. You cannot be long in Kampala without hearing rumours about it ╤ of people going in never to be seen again, of people being brutally killed there by the military police and army, with no trace of them in any police records.
With our suitcases, we were put in the back of a police Landrover and, with a police car wailing its siren ahead of us, driven through the twilight to Makindye.
As the vehicle stopped at the prison gatehouse, armed troops swarmed around bawling at us in Swahili and English: ╥Down!╙ Some struck out with batons and rifle butts to hurry us. The soldiers shouted that we must sit on the ground to take our shoes off. Then, with a few more blows to urge us on, we were taken into the guard room, and again bawled at to sit on the floor. As an NCO started to take down a list of our names, an African was flung through the door, falling on top of me.
The suddenness of the onslaught of hysterical sounding soldiers and the blows after the painstaking treatment and hours of sitting, waiting, was numbing and very frightening. But that was to be the end of any physical maltreatment. Our property was meticulously checked and listed and then we were led off barefooted into the barbed wire compounds and huts of the prison by a plain-clothes policeman with a machine pistol, who behaved quietly.
We were led into a 50 ft. long room with high barred windows. Fifteen or so Africans were lying on blankets on the concrete floor. At a shout from the guards some of them threw us each a blanket and we were told to lie down. A moment later the steel door grated shut, the light went out, and we were left for the night.
The night was warm, but the combination of shock and the hardness of the concrete under the blanket made sleep near impossible. In the almost pitch black one of the African prisoners came to whisper questions about who we were and where we had been arrested. Stretched out side by side we whispered to each other. The two Swedes, it turned out, had been in Kampala only six hours when they were arrested. They had been standing on the roof of the hotel looking round at the city beneath. One had asked an African waiter where President Amin╒s house was. When they went down to the hotel lobby later the waiter had pointed them out to the police and they had been taken away.
Outside we could hear soldiers shouting and vehicles coming and going throughout a very long night. The whole camp was as tense as we were. There was no way of telling what was going on ╤ all we knew was that that morning╒s news bulletin had announced that a thousand Tanzanian troops had invaded Uganda.
In the first light of dawn through the barred windows high above us I saw two Africans across the cell silently go through the Moslem ritual of prayer, standing and kneeling towards Mecca. Following the example of the African prisoners we folded up our blankets and sat on them, leaning against the wall.
Outside voices were barking in Swahili, and once or twice I recognised an Arabic expression. Inside we sat quietly talking, now and then going to get a drink of water from one of the three showers. Of the two lavatories we were told to use only one. The other gushed water out from a broken bowl on to the floor.
At intervals throughout the four days in the cell, the door would crash open and a group of armed soldiers would come in, counting the prisoners ╤ one could not count properly and had to get a prisoner to do it for him ╤ or bringing people in or taking them out. Some groups spoke reasonably, most shouted in the harsh barking Swahili that seemed to be the standard.
In the early Monday afternoon some food arrived outside. The Africans filed out for a plate or mess tin of cooked beans, but the supply ran out before all were served. We had no plates, anyway. But we were given a packet of the hard army biscuits and that, with water in a borrowed mug, was lunch. There was another meal in the early evening ╤ rice and meat ╤ and by then we had acquired a mess tin, but could eat nothing.
At intervals throughout the days, the two or three Moslems prayed. One group of African prisoners held a Christian service. They prayed and then one gave his explanation of why God permitted suffering to exist in the world. Three police officers and a fire brigade officer were among those who took part in these quiet devotions. Hours later the cell door opened and the guards, with their guns, came in shouting for the policemen to come out. The four ran to the door, lined up and were escorted away.
A couple of hours later two guards came into the cell and collected the odds and ends of clothing and small cloth bags of personal possessions of the four who had gone. When the guards left I asked what they had said and was told by African prisoners that they had said the four men had been killed. We had listened earlier to noises like wooden clubs being wielded but had no way of telling what they were.
No shots were ever heard in the prison. African prisoners told me that the normal method of execution was by ╥tapping╙ a man╒s skull with a 20 lb. hammer. One said he knew of 20 prisoners who died in this way. He said he had seen one group made to lie down. Then the first man was forced at gun point to get up and smash the skull of another prisoner. Each was made to kill the man beyond him and a soldier dispatched the last.
