About a kilometer from Kasese town is Omusinga Charles Wesley Mumbere’s Bihikira Royal palace that was recently stormed by the UPDF and the Omusinga arrested.
The heavy stench of blood welcomes you at the main entrance to the palace on an elevated area with a beautiful scenery of the town.
Inside are a number of small grass thatched huts burnt to ashes belonging to the royal guards commonly referred to as Kirumira Mutima, a number of whom were killed during the Sunday afternoon raid by the army.
Some military items left behind by the royal guards
The huts surround the main house in which the Omusinga reportedly lived in and these form an inner security ring to him.
The huts with ditches dug as a defensive strategy have a number of items including abandoned clothes, home utensils and kitchen ware clearly showing that they had occupants.
The main house with a royal emblem of the Obusinga has furniture and other household items but behind it are other small houses and the vehicles used to chauffer the Omusinga abandoned with flat tyres.
Outside the palace are other huts which according to security formed the outer security ring to the Omusinga.
The main house was left intact
Addressing journalists on Thursday, the police spokesperson Andrew Felix Kaweesi who had led journalists to a tour of the destroyed palace which is cordoned off as a crime scene, said in a few days they would be vacating the place and hand it over.
“Mumbere is an individual who participated in committing crimes and we cannot close this cultural institution site. We have nothing to do with this and once we are done, we shall call them and hand it to them,” the police spokesperson told journalists.
“This was the final position of engaging the fighters .Whenever they finished attacking security personnel, they retreated to this palace and found their colleagues,” Kaweesi said.
Remains of the royal Regalia.
He dismissed as ‘baseless’, claims of bombing the palace by the army.
“If we had used bombs, his main house would not be intact as it is now,” he said.
He said the huts inside the palace harbored the Royal guards stressing they were all burnt due to the fire from the food they were cooking and the petrol bombs the fighters had inside.
The huts surrounded the main house to form a security ring