The UPDF says it killed Kalalang, the LRA brigade chief

By Henry Mukasa

ANOTHER senior rebel commander has been killed in the ongoing military operation against the LRA in the Central African Republic, according to the army.

LRA brigade commander Okello Kalalang died as a result of wounds sustained last week during an encounter with a UPDF squad near Obo.

“His body was found and positively identified by LRA defectors on Saturday,” said UPDF spokesman Lt. Col. Felix Kulayigye.
The army said they heard about the injured Kalalang from a girl-abductee who had surrendered to them.

“She told us Kalalang was wounded and had given his gun to her to bring to the LRA meeting point,” Kulayigye said.

“She later guided us to the place where she left him. That is where we found his body.”

After Kalalang’s death, he said, two lieutenants, a sergeant and four Ugandan women with two children surrendered to the UPDF.

“We also received three sub-machine guns,” he said, adding: “I see the end of the LRA. We continue harvesting them like mangoes.”
Kalalang, whose name means ‘black crawling insect with a painful sting’, was one of the most cruel commanders of the LRA.

In 2006, he ordered two abducted boys from Oyam, aged 10 and 12, to bite to death their 15-year- old brother, Samuel, for having escaped from the rebels before.

“After the biting, he was taken behind a nearby anthill and hit using a stump on the back of his head,” Lawrence, one of the boys, told The New Vision in July 2007.
“They left him lying in a pool of blood. He didn’t move. I think he died when we were biting him.”

The youngest brother, James, said he would not rest until he had returned to the spot where he last saw his brother to find out what happened to his body.

Kalalang later ordered James’ ear to be cut off because the boy, who was starving, had taken some beans from a boiling pot. Kalalang’s death brings to three the number of senior commanders eliminated in the last month.

A fortnight ago, the UPDF killed Lt. Col. Santos Alit and five other rebels 15km north-east of Obo.
Two weeks earlier, the army captured Maj. Okot Atiak, the commander who reportedly led the 1995 massacre of 250 civilians in Atiak.

Kony himself is believed to be in the Central African Republic but an LRA unit has reportedly been sighted near Wau, a town in the province of Bahr el Ghazal in Southern Sudan.

The Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, has just returned from the Central African Republic where he held meetings with his counterparts in the region.

Sources said the joint forces in the anti-LRA operation were planning a major offensive in the area.