President Museveni last night assured that the security situation in the country is under control and episodes of criminal activities such as the attempted assassination last Tuesday of outgoing Works minister, Gen Katumba Wamala, will be contained.

Citing Daily Monitor’s reporting on security matters which he claimed bordered on creating panic and pessimism, Mr Museveni, who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, said accounts that most high-profile killings in the country have remained unresolved are “not entirely true, not wholly correct.”

Investigations into the 68 of those cases, he said, had been resolved and directed police director for Criminal Investigations, AIGP Grace Akullo, to make the findings public.

The President argued that the newspaper’s reporting also portrayed a dilemma that the elite are worried, but unable to flee the country because of concerns about what to do with their material possessions amassed here.

“The [Daily] Monitor was saying that the elite are now stuck because they have a lot of property, but they are worried… I will answer the (Daily) Monitor,” he said.

According to Mr Museveni, the reporting on the broad-day June 1 attack on Gen Katumba, a former army commander and police chief, in Kampala during which his daughter Brenda Nantongo and driver Haruna Kayondo were killed, appeared to raise the question “if a whole [military] general can be attacked, what about us [ordinary citizens]?”

“[Military] generals also have blood, if you don’t know, they can be attacked,” he said, citing what he called “some weaknesses” in Gen Katumba’s personal security detail.

He added: “The general, if he is not alert, and the people are not alert, he can be attacked. In the case of Gen Katumba, he had also made mistakes because he was moving without a follow car. I didn’t know that…”

Questions about why the former chief of defence forces and inspector general of police was not chauffeured in bullet-proof car and without escort vehicle were raised in the wake of the failed assassination and UPDF redirected to Gen Katumba for answers.

“So, you can see now that these people (armed criminals) are now using our laxity [and] peace to commit crime. When you provoke us and we wake up, we will get you,” Mr Museveni vowed, citing the defeat of killers of women in Entebbe and Nansana about three years ago.

The President, in a calculation to let an ordinary citizen assure peers, invited Ms Resty Nakyambadde, a former nurse in greater Masaka area now tapped as a Special Forces nurse, to show security forces defeated a machete-wielding gang that attacked her on the 2018 New Year’s eve.

Ms Nakyambadde telephoned her husband who alerted police whose pursuit forced one of the thugs to drop a mobile phone handset and security used the SIM-card information to map out, kill and or arrest the outlaws.