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Kampala / AFP
Uganda’s main opposition leader was held by police on Monday at a police station outside the capital after being taken from his home where he had been under house arrest.
Kizza Besigye has rejected the results of Thursday’s election won by veteran President Yoweri Museveni, and called on his supporters to join a protest march to the Electoral Commission headquarters in Kampala on Monday.
A police spokesman said Besigye was being held at the Nagalama police station around 40 kilometres north of the capital under “preventative arrest”.
“We are preventing him from going to cause violence around the Electoral Commission offices,” said Patrick Onyango, the Kampala police spokesman.
Official results declared on Saturday gave Museveni 60 percent of the vote against 35 percent for Besigye, who was arrested three times before, during and after the election.
Ugandan police said in a statement that Besigye’s planned march would be illegal, adding that with the start of the new school term on Monday it would also “infringe on the collective rights of the parents and their school-going children”.
Besigye was placed under house arrest on Friday after police raided his Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) headquarters accusing party officials of planning to release their own tally of results, contravening electoral law.
Police on Monday took Besigye from his home in Kasangati, north of the capital Kampala, according to city police spokesman Onyango.
Besigye did not speak as he was bundled into a van with tinted windows and driven away.