A pastor alleged to have raped a Latvian tourist who had come to Uganda for holidays, has been arrested, Police confirmed on Monday.
Anda, a 36-year-old Latvian national arrived in Uganda last month and she intended to spend 35 days in the country.
According to a story published by Daily Monitor newspaper, the tourist had been invited to Uganda by a pastor named Joseph Collins Twahirwa who ministers with Epikaizo Ministries International.
Anda had previously visited Africa (twice) and she enjoyed the experience at the beaches in Egypt. When she decided to make another trip to Africa, initially she was torn between Egypt, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“I love the African people and I wanted to know them more. I love the food and the music. That’s why I wanted to spend the [recently-concluded] Christmas period here. I wanted to know more about African people,” she told Daily Monitor.
But then, Pastor Collins convinced her Uganda was a better destination.
“Daddy Collins told me if I want to come to Africa, I should come to Uganda so that we pray. I agreed to come to Uganda,” Anda says.
However, what she anticipated would be beautiful visit turned out to be the complete opposite – a nightmare. In fact, she says she will never entertain the thought of returning to Uganda.
“I have had a bad experience and I will never return. People have been following me. I feel really bad.”
She claims that when she arrived in Uganda, her plan was to check into an AirBnB in Makindye. Instead, the Pentecostal pastor’s aides who received her at Entebbe airport drove her straight to the pastor’s residence. And it is there that he raped her, according to her account.
“I heard Daddy Collins knocking and telling me to open the door [She had been ushered into a bedroom where she was told she would stay]. But I couldn’t open it because I was in the shower. He opened the door and he told me he wanted to keep warm. He pushed me to the bed,” she says.
“He said he wanted to have a baby. He pushed me onto the bed and raped me,” Anda said in her account. She also accuses the pastor of stealing her money, after he had volunteered to help her exchange the Euros into Ugandan Shillings.
Now, Police have revealed that they have arrested the pastor in question.
“Following a case that was reported in the media last week concerning a one Ms. Anda, a Latvian national who had come in Uganda as a visitor and had been invited by one pastor Twahirwa Joseph Collins, this is to update you that currently, the pastor is in our custody as we are still finalizing with our investigations,” Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Claire Nabakka, the deputy police spokesperson told reporters Monday.
She said the case is of alleged rape and fraud, adding that “it brings out an element of unprofessionalism that Police officers exhibited at Jinja Road Police station”.
“On 15th of this month, three of our officers at Jinja Road Police Station were arrested,” SSP Nabakka added.
The arrested officers include Oyera Doreen (a detective surgent), Akite Judith (detective corporal) and Ayeleget Joyce (detective constable). All the three have been charged with irregular conduct contrary to Section 44 of the Police Act.
The victim’s travel has been extended in order to allow thorough investigations.
Police is calling on all people who might have similar allegations against Pastor Collins to file complaints at the Police Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) headquarters.
Anda claims that her efforts to report the pastor to Police were frustrated by police officers.
She says at Jinja Road Police, a policeman asked her for money. When she said she had no money, the officer allegedly reportedly asked for sex.
In addition, she accuses police officers of conniving with the pastor and his supporters to torment her after which they deleted all phone communications she had with the pastor, in an attempt to destroy evidence of their interactions.
Uganda invests a huge chunk of time and resources in marketing itself as a tourism destination. Tourism was Uganda’s leading foreign exchange earner before the Covid pandemic. It earned the country $1.6 bn and contributed about 8 percent to the GDP and over 500,000 jobs.
Stories that put Uganda in negative light internationally, undermine the efforts by the private tour operators and investors in tourism as well as the government, in marketing destination Uganda. Anything that jeopardizes the safety of a tourist makes them reconsider which destination to go to.
At the moment Uganda’s tourism sector is reeling from the impact of the recent Ebola epidemic which resulted into massive cancellations from foreigners who had plans to visit Uganda.
Benedict Ntale, a private tour operator who runs Ape Treks says anything that taints the image of Uganda, however small, is not desirable.
“The State should take the lead in knowing the value of a positive image for the country, because a bad image for Uganda doesn’t only hurt tourism. It also hurts foreign investment into the country. It hurts other sectors too,” Ntale who is also a board member of Exclusive Sustainable Tour Operators told Plugged on Monday.
He says the tourism private sector has little control over the factors that contribute to a negative image of Uganda, particularly in the latest case of the Latvian tourist, considering she did not arrange her visit through any tour operator.
“It would have been horrible had she been raped by a tour operator. Generally, this sounds like one of those isolated cases. Uganda isn’t known for such criminal activity. Unlike countries like South Africa,” he said.
On Monday, Police gave assurance that Anda’s case would be followed up to ensure justice prevails.
“We thank the media that covered this story and we do pledge to you all that this case will be concluded to fair justice. We take cases of gender-based violence seriously and we pledge to professionally handle them,” the deputy Police spokesperson said.
Prior to the Covid pandemic, Uganda’s annual tourist arrivals stood at 1.5m (in 2019). But this number dropped by more than half, to about half a million in 2020 due to the travel restrictions adopted globally to curb the spread of coronavirus.
