UGANDA: 2 Ugandans Executed for Killing Irish Priest

2 Ugandan soldiers were shot dead by firing squad for murdering an Irish Catholic priest and 2 other men in the country's 1st public execution in a decade, an army spokesman said on Tuesday.

 An Irish aid agency and a colleague of the murdered priest condemned the executions which took place before hundreds of spectators at an army barracks on Monday.

 The soldiers, corporal James Omedio and private Abdallah Mohammed, dressed in plain green fatigues, were lashed to trees a few yards from the gate of the Kotido army barracks in northeastern Uganda. They were shot by 10 masked soldiers.

 The pair were hooded, barefoot and had their hands tied behind their backs, a local reporter told Reuters.

 A medical officer who checked the soldiers after the firing said Mohammed was not dead. An officer drew his pistol and shot the private once in the head.

 The bodies were then taken away for burial.

 Father Declan O'Toole, 31, his driver and another passenger were shot dead on Thursday about 220 miles from the capital Kampala as they traveled by road in the volatile Karamoja region.

 Army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza said: "It is a kind of a sacrifice. We are showing the people that we do not tolerate such acts of indiscipline.

 "This is the 1st time in the last 10 years that we have executed someone in public," he said.

 BRUTAL

 Irish aid agency Goal said the execution highlighted the brutal nature of President Yoweri Museveni's government. It described the former guerrilla leader's 16-year rule as one of the most repressive regimes in Africa.

 "The fact that these men were taken out and put up against a tree and shot dead stinks," Goal Chief Executive John O'Shea said in a statement. "It is a case of dead men tell no stories."

 Father Joseph Jones, a Dublin-based colleague of O'Toole, said senior officers may have been to blame for the killings.

 "If the army was involved then they are the ones that should be punished and not those two poor fellows who were executed yesterday, because if they did fire the shots then they were only acting on orders from senior officers," Jones, a member of St. Joseph's Society for Foreign Missions, told Irish radio.

 Jones said O'Toole had been beaten by army officers 2 weeks ago after appealing to them to tone down their violence against locals.

 Ugandan newspapers said O'Toole had been beaten by soldiers earlier this month after he accused them of torturing parishioners whom the army suspected of hiding guns.

 Karamoja has been unstable for years, partly due to the number of arms held by the area's nomadic tribesmen.

 The soldiers, who were arrested on Friday, were convicted on Monday in a 4-hour court martial held under a tree in the center of the army post, a collection of grass-thatched huts.