Police Investigators are yet to make any headway in identifying the person who issued death threats to Andrew Felix Kaweesi days before he was assassinated twelve days ago.

The threats are one of the leads that police is following in trying to bring to look for the assassins of Kaweesi, his driver Godfrey Mambewa and body guard Kenneth Erau. The trio was gunned down on the morning of March 17 when gunmen ambushed the car in which they were traveling near Kaweesi’s residence in Kulambiro, Kampala.

The police have so far arrested 15 suspects in connection to the murder, some of them using composite images based on eyewitness descriptions. Police detectives have also received statements from the family members and some close friends of the fallen Assistant Inspector General of Police Kaweesi indicating that he had received numerous threats on phone prior to his murder.

According to a reliable source within the Special Investigations Division (SID) who is part of the investigations, there were a number of text messages sent to Kaweesi threatening his life.

“After we received the information about the death threats, we perused through Kaweesi’s phones and found some messages. We have since been trying to trace the faces behind the messages,” says the operative.

Before Kaweesi was shot and killed he received threat messages on his mobile phone
URN has learnt that three mobile telephone numbers which police was trying to trace were found not to have been registered. While Kaweesi’s replacement as police spokesperson, Asan Kasingye, was not willing to comment on the progress of this particular murder investigation, he says existence of unregistered simcards has blocked very many investigations.

“People buy these lines, use them to threaten or even defraud people. These sim cards are then disposed, making it impossible to trace them,” Kasingye says.

Police has since asked the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) to switch off all unregistered sim cards.

In March 2013, UCC launched what it called a mandatory Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card registration setting a deadline of August 2013 for all mobile phone users to have registered their cards. The deadline, however, passed quietly.

In November 2015, UCC wrote to all mobile telecom players to register all their subscribers or face consequences. The consequences, UCC warned, included revoking licenses, fines or disconnection.

To this day, however, thousands of sim cards are still in operation without being registered. UCC has said it will switch off all unregistered simcards by midnight today.

By URN