A Kampala congregation “are in a week of praise, worship and thanking God for His protection” after police arrested a man who was trying to enter their church on Sunday with an improvised explosive device he planned to use for an attack there, a Ugandan pastor told Gateway News last night.
“We are so amazed at how God protected us. The devil is trying to stop the revival but the revival is going on,” said Pastor Ddiba Assadi, a church leader in the city and a member of the ministry team of Pastor Robert Kayanja who leads the Miracle Centre Cathedral where the bomb attack was prevented.
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The church in the Ugandan capital’s Rubaga division was the site of a remarkable all-night revival service that started in 2016 and ran every night for at least four years, with hundreds of thousands of people attending on occasions.
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Hundreds of people were evacuated from the church last Sunday after police arrested the would-be attacker and detonated the device safely nearby. The church was cordoned off and sniffer dogs and bomb squad officers sent to comb the expansive grounds, but no further threat was found.
The bomb was discovered after intelligence agents received a tipoff about the planned attack and tracked the suspect who was arrested at a checkpoint at the entrance to the church property.
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Ugandan police spokesman Patrick Onyango told reporters that the detainee, Kintu Ibrahim, was carrying the bomb in his backpack at the time of his arrest. The device was made up of nails, a motorbike battery, a charger and a telephone handset.
He said Ibrahim confessed he had three accomplices who had also been sent to carry out similar attacks.
“He’s helping us locate those people,” Onyango said, adding that the suspect was being held on terrorism related charges.
Speaking to journalists after Ibrahim was arrested, Pastor Robert Kayanja thanked God and alert security personnel for foiling Sunday’s attempted bomb attack on the Miracle Centre Cathedral.
In a message to the people of Uganda, he said: “Please be very vigilant. This is not a hoax. Because it is very easy when you hear a message that terrorists are coming, to say: ‘I’ve heard it before.’ If there was no vigilance today, we would probably be now mourning. So I am appealing now to every Ugandan to watch.”
The motives of Ibrahim and his fellow attackers are unclear, but the Islamic State -linked Allied Democratic Forces has previously carried out deadly bomb attacks in Uganda.
ADF was originally a Ugandan rebel group but was routed more than two decades ago and fled into the jungles of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where it has since been based.
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