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KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — An Islamic extremist rebel leader recently arrested in Tanzania is set to be extradited to Uganda after Tanzanian authorities agreed to cooperate, the head of Interpol in Uganda said Tuesday.
Jamil Mukulu, the Ugandan boss of the armed group Allied Democratic Forces, appeared in a Tanzanian court on Friday, charged with multiple counts of murder, after his extradition papers were filed, said Asan Kasingye.
"He doesn't want to go back to Uganda because he thinks they will just kill him," said Kasingye, who questioned Mukulu in the Tanzanian city Dar es Salaam.
Kasingye said the rebel leader was "picked up" from his home in Dar es Salaam earlier this year after an apparent tip-off.
The Kinshasa government is also urging Mukulu's extradition to Congo, saying he committed more crimes there.
The ADF originated in Uganda in the 1990s but now operates in the jungles of eastern Congo. The group is accused of carrying out massacres in Uganda as well as in parts of eastern Congo, including killings recently near the town of Beni in Congo's North Kivu province. In that attack in mid-May, rebels using machetes and axes killed 23 people in an overnight assault on several small villages.
Mukulu had been sanctioned by the U.S. and was the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant for attacks carried out against civilians.
A convert to Islam, Mukulu is accused of ordering a range of crimes, including a 1998 massacre in which scores of students were burned to death in their dormitories in a town near the Congo border.
The ADF, which originally said it opposed what it called the marginalization of Ugandan Muslims, is accused of launching a series of deadly bomb blasts in the Ugandan capital of Kampala in the late 1990s before a military operation forced the rebels to set up camp in eastern Congo.
A U.N. report in 2012 said ADF rebels had "expanded their military capacity and cooperated" with Somalia's al-Shabab extremists.
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