FORMER Ugandan President Idi Amin (right) has finally emerged from a nearly week-long coma and his condition is improving, sources at a hospital in the Red Sea city of Jeddah said Wednesday, reports Alfred Wasike & agencies.

“He’s out of a coma and his condition is improving. However, he remains in the intensive care unit,” the hospital sources told the French news agency, AFP, yesterday, at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, one of Saudi Arabia’s top medical centres.

The King Faisal Specialist Hospital officials refused to specify the exact cause of Idi Amin’s illness or provide details about his condition at the request of family members who have been living with him in Saudi Arabia in obscurity for more than 10 years.

On Tuesday, the Minister for the Presidency, Ali Kirunda Kivejinja, told The New Vision that although Amin was still in danger and in intensive care unit, he could painfully recognise close members of his family.

On Tuesday, one of his wives, Madina and a daughter travelled to Jeddah from Kampala facilitated by the Government.

President Yoweri Museveni announced in Kampala on Tuesday that Amin whose 1971-1979 reign was characterised by a bloody regime in which at least 400,000 Ugandans are estimated to have been killed, or are unaccounted for will not get a state funeral if he dies but that his body can be returned home for burial.

Museveni vowed to arrest Amin for alleged atrocities committed during his time if he returned to Uganda alive.

Idi Amin, a Muslim now in his eighties, was admitted to hospital last Friday.

His 1971 to 1979 reign in Uganda following a military coup was one of the bloodiest in Africa's modern history, and Amin has not been back to his country since joint forces of Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles ousted him on April 11, 1979.
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