IN SUMMARY
A resident says the powerful lighting at the toll gate on Entebbe expressway near the scene where the duo was shot was curiously off that fateful night. Police spokesperson Fred Enanga said investigators are convinced of a third party involvement in the killing of Nteireho and Merina. “What remains now is to identify that third party and arrest them,” he said in an interview last Saturday. He added that police are yet to interview Merina’s husband.
The late Joshua Ruhegyera Nteireho met yet-to-be identified people at a fast-food restaurant at a fuel station on Entebbe Road and offered a ride to two of them on the September 5 trip that ended in a gunman shooting him and Merina Tumukunde dead.
The duo was killed between 10:30pm and 11pm near Nambigirwa Bridge on Entebbe expressway, according to residents near the scene and police.
Our investigations, based on interviews last week with residents and workers of hotels the deceased last visited, show that the individuals that Nteireho held a meeting with at the fuel station in Kajjansi, had driven in a Toyota Harrier.
That vehicle took the lead and Nteireho, behind the steering in a black Land Cruiser, followed suit, according to witnesses.
A resident told this newspaper that the powerful lighting at the toll gate on Entebbe expressway, roughly 200 metres from the scene where the duo was shot, was curiously off that fateful night.
The illumination there radiates so powerfully that people living in the village say some of them use the brightness half-a-kilometre away to lay bricks or do other activities at night.
The witness, whose name we are withholding for safety reasons, said the killers escaped in a get-away vehicle whose headlights were switched off.
A witness, in accounts corroborated by another resident, said police were near the scene where Nteireho and Merina were gunned because they could see the red-blue siren light flashing on a police patrol pick-up.
“We were burning bricks when we heard three guns shots. There was a police patrol that was on the opposite side of the road. Police drove round and came back and stopped where the incident happened. When they reached the scene, they also fired bullets,” a resident of Bukandekande Village in Mpala Katabi Town Council, said.
The vehicle appeared afterwards to give a chase, but it remained unclear if the police failed to catch up with the killers.
Identities of the passengers picked up from the Entebbe road-side fuel remain unknown.
Our investigations also revealed that Nteireho, for reasons that staff at Innophine Hotel behind the Mayor’s Garden in Entebbe could not immediately understand, called on the phone and booked two rooms.
He, however, arrived at the hotel with Merina. Both reportedly instead checked in the same room.
It is here that detectives later recovered Merina’s handbag and mobile phone handset, sources close to the investigations told Daily Monitor.
