KAMPALA- As the hunt for Assistant Commissioner of Police Jonathan Baroza intensifies, intriguing information has emerged on how he eluded his hunters to flee the Algerian capital Algiers to an unknown country.
It is not yet clear whether it was sheer coincidence or a carefully planned escape scheme but Mr Baroza left Algeria for a meeting in Congo-Brazaville on the day he received information that the Uganda police wanted him back home.
On July 19 this year, the African Union Mechanism for Police Cooperation (AFRIPOL) Secretariat in Algeria wrote to the Ugandan embassy there, informing them of an email it had received from its AFRIPOL counterpart in Kampala, seeking Mr Baroza’s return home.
Mr Baroza had been posted to AFRIPOL Algeria as a senior counter-terrorism officer on September 15 last year.
“The AFRIPOL secretariat received an email from the AFRIPOL National Liaison Office of Uganda on June 13, 2018, informing that Mr Baroza was urgently required to meet with the Inspector General of the Uganda Police Force,” reads the letter from AFRIPOL Algeria to the Ugandan embassy.
This information was duly delivered to Mr Baroza. However on the same day, June 13, Mr Baroza had been nominated to represent AFRIPOL at a high-level meeting of Central and West African police chiefs from June 13 to June 14 in Congo-Brazaville. So, he travelled to Brazaville.
The agenda of the meeting was to strengthen cooperation in the fight against transnational organised crime. Mr Baroza was expected back in Algiers two days after the meeting but he did not.
In their letter to the Ugandan embassy in Algiers, AFRIPOL states: “A ticket was also sent, a copy of which is here attached. This information was transmitted to Mr Baroza accordingly. It is, however, noted that whereas Mr Baroza was expected back in Algiers on June 16, according to his ticket, he has not reported back to office to date.”
This is the scenario that has rattled Uganda’s ambassador to Algeria John Chrysostom Alintuma Nsambu who derides the wisdom and competence of the Uganda police.
“This is the question disturbing my mind. If indeed you want to arrest somebody who is abroad and you know that there is an accredited embassy there, how can you make any attempt without using services of your embassy?” Mr Nsambu charged. He said if the Uganda police had approached the embassy, they would have asked the Algerian government for assistance to trace Mr Baroza.
“To us it is a surprise that we read about Baroza in the media that he is in Algiers and some people have been sent to arrest him. I do not know whether police is doing the right thing,” Ambassador Nsambu recently told Daily Monitor by telephone from Algiers.
Police spokesperson Emilian Kayima said Mr Baroza’s mysterious disappearance is a concern to the Force.
“Assistant Commissioner Baroza is a senior police officer and in 2017, he was deployed in Algeria as our liaison officer to run different programmes. Unfortunately of recent, he went AWOL [absent without official leave] and the police and all responsible institutions would always want to know where their officers are. So we got concerned that he was not at his duty station,” Mr Kayima said.
However, Mr Nsambu said he learnt of Mr Baroza’s disappearance only on television.
“Eventually I wrote to AFRIPOL headquarters in Addis-Ababa and attached a letter I received from Kampala, inquiring where he could be and they responded. They wrote, saying Baroza was seconded by the government of Uganda through the Ugandan Embassy in Addis-Ababa but unfortunately, they said he had disappeared and they could not locate him,” he said.
His position is corroborated or reinforced by Mr Kayima’s admission that Uganda police cannot tell Mr Baroza’s whereabouts.
“Currently, we do not know where he is. It is a concern. If he is alive, we shall get to know where he is. Maybe people out there know where he is. I wish they could notify us. Then we would be able to find him and know why he went absent without official leave,” said Mr Kayima.
Embassy in the dark
Ambassador Nsambu said the embassy knew Mr Baroza’s residence in Algiers after police intervention to retrieve his properties from the house where he lived.
“It was the police together with the landlord that approached the embassy. They asked us to go and witness the removal of Mr Baroza’s properties in an apartment he had rented. I deployed two police officers who went with the landlord to remove Baroza’s belongings and we kept them at our embassy,” he said.
Mr Baroza was posted to the Ugandan mission in Algeria on August 7 last year after he had been seconded by the then Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura.
Surprisingly, Mr Baroza was instead given a contract as senior counter terrorism officer with AFRIPOL in Algeria. The contract was to run from September 15, 2017 to September 14, 2019.
It is strange how Mr Baroza, who had been posted to the Ugandan embassy in Algiers did not report to his duty station but instead went to the AFRIPOL secretariat in the same capital.
Indeed, Ambassador Nsambu, the head of the mission, said he did not know about Mr Baroza’s presence in Algeria until the Uganda police started looking for him.
This development further compounds the dubiousness about Mr Baroza’s deployment in Algeria and eventual disappearance.
Daily Monitor has seen a copy of his appointment letter but it breeds more questions than answers.
Whereas the African Union job took effect in September last year, Mr Baroza left Uganda for Algeria in May last year and was appointed a police liaison officer charged with overseeing the procurement of CCTV cameras to be installed in Kampala and other towns to improve security surveillance.
“Baroza is already in Algeria. He will be coordinating with Algeria ICT experts to help in the installation of CCTV cameras. Algeria has also sent us a permanent ICT manager, Mr Salim Baba, and he will be sitting at our headquarters,” Mr Asan Kasingye, the then police spokesperson, said at a news conference at Naguru police headquarters. The press conference was also addressed by his then boss, Gen Kayihura.
This suggests Mr Baroza was sent to Algiers before his appointment to the African Union or he first served in a different capacity and elsewhere, but without knowledge of Uganda’s embassy in Algeria, before he was appointed to AFRIPOL secretariat.
Ambassador Nsambu said he was surprised to learn of Mr Baroza’s presence in Algiers.
“I started hearing about ACP Jonathan Baroza being deployed here. I started asking myself; where is he? The impression given to the Ugandan public is that he worked at the Ugandan embassy in Algiers, which is not true at all. Surprisingly we received a letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also asking the same question you are asking me now,” he said.
If Mr Baroza was posted as a liaison officer at the Ugandan embassy in Algiers but the head of the mission did not know about him, this begs the question, what was he doing or where was he working from May to August 2017 before he was appointed at AFRIPOL in September same year?
Mysterious posting
“This surprised me because my ministry is supposed to know how many Ugandans are at any embassy abroad. We explained that as much as he was in Algiers, he was at a different office—AFRIPOL– an institution of the African Union,” Mr Nsambu said.
Mr Baroza did not register his presence at the Uganda embassy when he reported in Algiers, which is also strange for Ugandan government officials who work in Algeria.
Following the assassination of former police spokesperson Andrew Felix Kaweesi in March 2017, there was information linking Mr Baroza to the murder. There was speculation that he had fled to avoid scrutiny over Kaweesi’s shooting. He was posted to Algiers two months after. However, he insisted he did not play any sinister role in the murder.
Mr Kayima said Mr Baroza is not under investigation for any crime or wrongdoing. “We do not have any file on him. In the event that we do not find him, there is a procedure. We shall write an innocent document to the world, asking them if they know where he could be. Let them tell us because he is our officer; we are concerned,” he said.
Mr Baroza’s trouble and hunt unfolded immediately after the arrest of Gen Kayihura on June 13. Shortly after Gen Kayihura’s detention, a joint team of military intelligence and Internal Security Organisation operatives arrested scores of his former associates or confidants.
Security sources said Mr Baroza remains a key person in the investigations into “inappropriate espionage and other serious crimes”, which have not yet been officially disclosed.