A 15-year-old Christian girl in western Uganda who lost the use of her legs after her father locked her in a room for six months for leaving Islam has begun to take tentative steps.
Susan Ithungu had been hospitalized since September 2010 after neighbors along with police rescued her.
Islamic extremists threw acid on a church leader on Christmas Eve shortly after a seven-day revival at his church, leaving him with severe burns that have blinded one eye and threaten sight in the other.
On Oct. 15, area Muslim leaders declared a fatwa against him demanding his death.
It is more than a decade since more than 1,000 people perished in a church building in Kanungu, Uganda, after what is believed to have been a well-planned move by cult leaders who thought the world was coming to an end on December 31, 1999 but it never came to pass.
Much as time has passed, people still feel the effect of the Movement for the Restoration of the 10 Commandments killings.
At least 321 people were killed and hundreds were abducted in one of the worst massacres by Africa’s most feared rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in the Democratic Republic of Congo in December.
The attack — which was unreported until now — confirms that the LRA has restarted terrorising the region despite losing its bases in Sudan a few years ago, when Khartoum, its main backer, signed a peace deal with south Sudanese rebels.
Police in Uganda on Monday exhumed bodies of three children who died under suspicious circumstances and were secretly buried at a home of a detained cult leader.
Police learnt of the cult after after a woman complained about her 3-year-old child who had been buried secretly, after being removed from her when she fell sick.
Three pastors of the church, Healing Outreach Ministries in Bungatira sub-county, Aswa county, were arrested in the raid that followed complaints by parents about their missing children.
Religious leader withdraws his children from school in protest over the introduction of Personal Identification Numbers.
A prominent female pastor in Uganda bribed and blackmailed worshippers to fake health ailments as serious as HIV/Aids so that she could then claim to have healed them, a parishioner alleged in a recent interview.
Top stories of ‘men of God’ using charms and electric gadgets to perform miracles, sodomy, raping girls and snatching wives and husbands of members of their flock, have of recent dominated front pages in Uganda’s newspapers, tainting the image of born again churches.
PASTOR MOSES SOLOMON MALE is Executive Director or Arising for Christ ministry. An ardent critic of the widespread prosperity gospel where pastors ‘sell’ prayers for numerous needs, Male tells RICHARD M. KAVUMA why he wants a judicial probe into born-again churches.