On the night of Sunday July 11, 2010, Ugandan intelligence alerted President Yoweri Museveni at State House in Entebbe that there had been a series of bomb blasts in Kampala. First indications were that the dead and injured were over 20.

Museveni, to the surprise of intelligence, casually remarked that he would handle that the following day.  What surprised some intelligence officers was the lack of surprise or concern by Museveni. He was very casual about the reports he was being given of the bomb blasts.

The following day, he made his way to Kampala to the Ethiopian Village Restaurant at Kabalagala and the Kyadondo Rugby Club at Lugogo. He was still in that casual mood that intelligence had seen him display when he was told about the attacks.

By Monday afternoon, according to Uganda Record sources, word had gone round among the intelligence community that these bombs had in fact been masterminded by none other than Museveni himself.

Several senior army officers knew this and explained to their alarmed families that they were not going to lose sleep over the attacks, because they knew perfectly well who was behind them.

It was this specific intelligence that led the Uganda Record, from the very beginning, to posit the theory that the bomb blasts were state-orchestrated and a continuation of several such bombings dating back to 1998 at various places in and around Kampala.

A Rwandan intelligence operative stationed in the Rubaga area of Kampala pointed a source to the heavy human and vehicle traffic around the bus park near the New Tazi Park and said these buses were mostly repaired and fueled by Somali mechanics.

The operative argued that had Al-Shabab wanted to target Kampala and inflict the heaviest human toll possible, they would have felt their way round the unfamiliar city by making contact with the Somali community in Kampala.

That community, if it had sympathizers, could easily have suggested these very buses and the taxi and bus parks as the best places at which to plant bombs.

Late on Monday afternoon, July 12, 2010, Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attacks. A Daily Monitor journalist who first contacted Al-Shabab within an hour of the blasts said the militants seemed to be surprised by the news of the attacks.

They later would express their satisfaction at the success of the bombings but still not claim responsibility.

Then once the world news media placed the blame on them and they started to get hundreds of congratulatory phone calls from Islamist militants from all over the world, with many young men volunteering to enlist with them and offers of money and arms being made as well, Al-Shabab quickly sensed a moment not to be squandered and suddenly claimed it hand in the bombings.

Appearing on the KFM talk show, the Hot Seat on Monday July 19, the former host of the show and now Managing Editor of the Independent news magazine, Andrew Mwenda, spoke at length and with confidence about how Ugandan intelligence had established in various reports a link between Al-Shabab and the Ugandan rebel group, the Allied Democratic Forces or ADF.

Mwenda was full of praise for Uganda's military intelligence and how under Brig. James Mugira the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence had instituted systems, reduced on such practices as illegal detentions and the agency was now much more professional than ever.

The way Mwenda spoke up in praise of the CMI under Mugira sounded much like his frequent praise heaped on President Paul Kagame's Rwanda. Mwenda said the ADF's leader, Jamil Mukulu had rebel assets based on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Uganda. Mukulu, Mwenda said, was based in London.

Meanwhile, with all the blame being leveled at Al-Shabab, the supposed collaborator with the ADF, by today Monday July 26, 2010, the ADF had not claimed any joint responsibility with Al-Shabab in the attacks on Kampala, something that it should by now have done to reinforce its image as successful.

The army spokesman, Lt. Col. Felix Kulaigye, later joined Mwenda on the Hot Seat. In stating his case, Kulaigye quoted the day's Red Pepper tabloid issue, July 19, 2010, in which a member of the public said he had seen suspicious people who spoke Arabic and appeared to be Somali at the Kyadondo Rugby Club on the night of the bomb blasts.

It was curious that something as major as this should have first been published by the Red Pepper and not in the more mainstream newspapers, the New Vision and Daily Monitor, who in the public's mind are more believable. Curiously too, Kulaigye pointed readers to the Red Pepper for the story.

Since Ugandan intelligence often leaks stories to the Red Pepper as a means of gauging public reaction, it was difficult to know what to make of this casual aside by Kulaigye in referring to the Red Pepper story as solid proof of Al-Shabab's hand.

The Hot Seat host, Charles Mwanguhya-Mpagi told Kulaigye that since the attacks a week earlier, he had not heard a single government official apologise to Ugandans over the state's failure to protect them from the attacks. Kulaigye did not respond to Mwanguhya's observation.

On Tuesday, July 20, a source at the Daily Monitor said the Uganda Police had started probing the bomb attacks but as the source put it "evidence pointing to Al-Shabab is getting dimmer and dimmer."

By Thursday evening July 22 the Daily Monitor source said police investigators had failed to find any trace of evidence pointing to Al-Shabab.

The following day, true to the report by the Daily Monitor source, by Friday July 23, the Red Pepper had suddenly stopped reporting on Al-Shabab and was mentioning in its place the Al-Qaeda group led by Osama bin Laden.

In its Sunday edition of July 25, the Red Pepper persisted with naming Al-Qaeda and not Al-Shabab in its lead story purporting to have details of the FBI's preliminary report.

Why, after all the initial emphasis on Al-Shabab, was the finger suddenly being pointed to Al-Qaeda? Had the FBI agents who descended on Kampala failed to find any link between Al-Shabab and the bomb blasts?

Meanwhile, on Wednesday night, July 21, 2010, Lt. Col. Kulaigye appeared on the NBS television programme The Barometer, hosted by Tony Owana. Owana is an editor at the army's magazine Tarehe Sita and also a columnist with the Red Pepper.

A viewer of that show sent the following SMS to the editor of the Uganda Record: "Kulaigye is on NBS TV. He talked about you, but didn't give any substantive response to your articles on the bombings. [The interviewer] Buyinza pointedly asked Kulaigye for his views on your [Uganda Record] articles. Buyinza mentioned [President Museveni's son Lt. Col.] Muhoozi [Kainerugaba] being at Kyadondo [Rugby Club], which gave Kulaigye the chance to evade the gist of Buyinza's question.

Kulayigye simply said something to effect that Muhoozi, as an issue, has been over-blown, and mentioned [U.S. President George] Bush Sr./Bush Jr., etc. That Kulayigye, a skilled spin doctor, would evade the gist of the question, scares me even more…"

This viewer attended the same school as Tony Geoffrey Owana, St. Mary's College Kisubi, where Owana was known as Anthony Buyinza.

This viewer touched on something important. The Uganda Record is about the only Ugandan and among the very few worldwide, if at all, that have questioned the official and now widely-believed version of the July 11, 2010 Kampala bombings. It has consistently claimed that the bombs were masterminded by President Yoweri Museveni.

Even after Al-Shabab claimed responsibility, the Uganda Record treated this as a publicity-seeking tact but still insisted that this was a deed orchestrated by Museveni.

Here was the army spokesman, being interviewed by a friendly editor of the army magazine and being asked by Owana pointed questions about the Uganda Record's claims.

Rather than dismiss the Uganda Record as deluded conspiracy theorists, Kulaigye evaded the subject and did not once question or dismiss the Uganda Record's serious allegations.

Why?

Because, as the Uganda Record asserted from the very start, the Kampala bomb blasts were not the work of Al-Shabab. Further evidence of this has come in the article above by a Somali analyst in London indicating that the photographs published by Ugandan police pointing to one of the supposed Kampala suicide bombers was, in fact, a doctored image of the former Somali Prime Minister, Prof. Ali Geedi.

Within a few days or weeks, even the claim about Al-Qaeda will start to fall apart and as the Uganda Record had been predicting, there will be a sudden move to block the Ugandan media from reporting anything further about the Kampala bombings --- just as happened in April 2000 when the Museveni government's hand in the Kanungu cult massacre started to become public.

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