Journalist Joy Doreen Biira was brutalised by police during her detention in Kasese police station that lasted some 23 hours, The Observer has established.
Police arrested Biira on Sunday after she captured and shared some harrowing clips of the burning palace of Omusinga wa Rwenzururu on social media. On Monday afternoon, police charged Biira and four friends with “abetting terrorism” before setting them free. The police, however, retained her car and car keys, laptop and camera equipment.
Biira, a television anchor with KTN, had travelled to her home town of Kasese last week for her traditional marriage to Kenyan boyfriend Newton Kungu, which took place on Saturday. But she returned to Kampala at 2am on Tuesday traumatized and often reduced to tears every time she was asked to discuss what transpired inside the police cells.
A close associate who spoke to The Observer said Biira was beaten with the butt of a gun and sustained bruises on her back and shoulders. The associate said Biira was targeted by police officers in a bid to wear her down.
Biira’s lawyer, Nicholas Opiyo, declined to discuss police‘s treatment of his client, only telling The Observer that she was shaken by the experience and was not yet in position to speak to the press about it.
The former NBS TV news anchor was due to return to Kenya yesterday, but cancelled her flight in order to continue with her recovery in Kampala. Opiyo described the circumstances that led to Biira’s arrest as “a misunderstanding” resulting from the police acting “in haste.”
“Further investigations will prove that Joy did nothing wrong to share pictures of the victims of the attack on the palace. She did not have in her possession pictures that not any other journalist who was there had,” he said.
But according to Andrew Felix Kaweesi, the police spokesperson, Biira was arrested because she “misbehaved” by allegedly accessing a cordoned-off area.
“Joy was arrested by police in connection with her suspicious conduct during the Sunday afternoon operation in the palace. Suspicious conduct was her operational conduct into the restricted areas and trying to conceal her identity and equipment she was using unlike other media persons that covered the same,” he said.
Opiyo said the treatment of Biira should create suspicion about the conduct of the security forces. He said: “It just shows how uncomfortable the security forces were [with letting] people know what they were doing there…She was simply doing her job as a trained journalist.”
According to Opiyo, they will engage the police authorities in order to resolve the issue.
“I have just got off the phone now with the officer-in-charge and they have undertaken to give us back the equipment. We want to get back that equipment because they don’t contain any information physically. If the police want information, they can take the memory card and camera; that is where the information is,” he said.
So far, according to Opiyo, the police have returned all the mobile phones belonging to Biira and her four colleagues. “We hope that in the same spirit, they will return the other things that they still hold,” he said.
Efforts to get the police to explain the mistreatment of the journalist were futile late last evening. Spokesman Andrew Felix Kaweesi was reportedly in a meeting and had not gotten back to us by press time.
hobenon@observer.ug