By Our Reporters
On Tuesday evening the country was engulfed in shock and horror after reports emerged that Blimah Nalule, the 19 year old YMCA student kidnapped Sunday night for the Shs10m ransom at Old Taxi Park, had been murdered after parents failed to pay the Shs10m her captors had been demanding since Sunday. In a much publicized crime, the teenage girl was intercepted Sunday night at 2am as she struggled to find her way back to YMCA Buwambo campus where she was a fine art student. She had barely lasted 10 days at the school. Her father Godfrey Kabuye insists that Ps Leonald Wambazu of Buikwe/Mbikko-based House of God Fire Ministries International was complicit in the kidnap and eventual murder of his daughter. The 30 year old kiwaani Pastor, who is already in Police custody has already opened up and told a few things to interrogators. In what clearly corroborates Kabuye’s narrative, Ps Wambazu confirms being the first one to know of the kidnap and also confirms being the last person Nalule had spoken to moments before she was kidnapped.
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Police sources say Wambazu says Nalule who had left the school on Friday, having rang and told her mum she had travelled to Iganga to visit a friend, had been sleeping at his house in Mbikko Njeru until she left to return to School. Her mum Faridah Nassali says the teenage girl passed by at home and left to return to school but its unclear why she didn’t travel until it was past 2am Sunday. Nalule’s brother Frank Ddungu says Ps Wambazu persuaded his sister to leave school to come and have some good time with him. Its possible Nalule could have lied her mum Faridah Nassali about travelling to Iganga yet she was sleeping at Ps Wambazu’s house which is on the same Nakibizi village as Godfrey Kabuye’s home where teenage Nalule was birthed and raised from. Why would she? Her daddy Godfrey Kabuye says the Pastor has been having a love affair with both daughter and mum (his own wife Faridah Nassali). He says he has been fighting the pastor for some time insisting that he stops sleeping with his wife to no avail. The pastor confirms sending Shs11,000 to Nalule which she used as transport to leave the school which she had joined barely two weeks earlier. In fact her mum Nassali says she was surprised when Nalule, who had joined the school very recently, spoke of having made new friends in far away places as Iganga. But the pastor says (most likely deceptively) that Nalule asked him for that financial bailout on grounds that she was going somewhere but on her way back from that unknown place she passed by at his place and slept over (doing what only God knows). That she eventually left his home saying she was passing home to check on her mum and then continue to school. Godfrey Kabuye accuses Ps Wambazu of taking advantage of his not so good financial status or position to begin giving directives to Faridah Nassali on how to run the home. The pastor says he has known Nalule for many years since she was an S1 girl at Nakibizi SS where he was an S6 student as she joined S1. He says they have been in a relationship and his plan was to officially marry her off perhaps after graduating at YMCA where she was doing a two year course. The Buwambo YMCA campus is in Migadde Bombo Road side and to reach there, a traveler goes to the old taxi park and boards taxis taking the Zirobwe direction. The pastor says that as she embarked on the Buikwe-Buwambo journey, Nalule gave him a call saying “I have set off” but he developed some premonition on grounds she was setting off late. That on reaching the taxi park, Nalule again rang Ps Wambazu and told him she had had difficulties getting taxis and she was being told it was too late to get any. He says moments later, the girl informed him she had come across a Good Samaritan who had offered to help get her a vehicle to carry her along. He says she met this Good Samaritan around Mini Price. He demanded to talk to the man who, he says, introduced himself as a top UTODA official for whom it wasn’t hard to get the girl a taxi that can travel at that time. The pastor says the male voice on the phone told him “even if I fail to get her a taxi, I’m a responsible person with a family and can shelter her in my own home and she travels tomorrow.” The pastor says the next call he got was announcing the girl’s kidnap and that her captors wanted Shs100m to release her. He says that’s when he crossed over to the girl’s home to inform her parents. This was past 1am and he knocked on the window on the part of the house where Faridah Nassali sleeps. Remember Godfrey Kabuye, the deceased’s father maintains that the pastor had overpenetrated his family and had cultivated a closer relationship to both Nalule and Nassali than him the family head. It was then that Godfrey Kabuye rang his brother Salongo Saleh Kizito, who stays nearer, to run to CPS Kampala and reported their daughter’s kidnap under SD/02/07/05/2018. It was Salongo Saleh Kizito who, on phone, negotiated with the kidnappers from the Shs100m they had initially demanded up to Shs10m which the family was still struggling to raise at the time their daughter was killed. Police sources quote the kidnapper as telling the family that the Shs1m they had so far raised as of 10am Monday morning was so little it wasn’t even enough to pay off the boys who did the actual kidnap before surrendering the girl for his custody and possession.
According to LC1 Chairman James Bossa in whose Mutundwe Kabawo zone the girl’s body was discovered, she must have been strangled dead and her tongue and breasts cut off at around 11am because his resident who first saw the body in a garden realized it still had some warmth. Her hands and legs where tightly tied with ropes. One of her eyes had also violently been removed, according to her maternal uncle Yahaya Bugembe who was among the first relatives on Mutundwe Kabaawo scene. She was buried yesterday Wednesday in Bunyumya village in Kayunga district. May her soul rest in eternal peace.
