KAMPALA (Reuters) -Tanzania has released the second of two foreign activists who had come to support an opposition leader charged with treason, her organisation said on Friday, after a Kenyan fellow activist said they had both been badly tortured.
Ugandan lawyer and activist Agather Atuhaire, who had been in custody since Monday, was abandoned at the border between Tanzania and Uganda, Agora Centre for Research, the Uganda-based rights group that she leads, posted on X.
“We are relieved to inform the public that (Agather) has been found,” it said.
On Thursday, Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi, who was also detained after arriving in Dar es Salaam to attend the first court appearance of Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu, had been dumped on the Kenyan border.
In a post on X, he said the last time he had been held together with Atuhaire was on Tuesday, when he had heard her groaning in pain after being tortured. Reuters could not reach Atuhaire directly.
“Our (torturers) were acting on orders from a ‘state security’ employee who came to Immigration offices and followed us to Central Police Station and ordered we should be taken to a secret location to be given a ‘Tanzanian treatment’,” Mwangi said.
Tanzanian officials had not commented on Atuhaire and Mwangi’s detentions specifically, but President Samia Suluhu Hassan warned foreign activists in public comments on Monday against “invading and interfering in our affairs”.
Lissu, who came second in Tanzania’s last presidential poll, was arrested last month and charged with treason over what prosecutors said was a speech calling on the public to rebel and disrupt elections due in October.
The case has highlighted a growing crackdown on opponents of Hassan, whose party has nominated her to stand again.
She won plaudits after coming to power in 2021 for easing the political repression that had proliferated under her predecessor, but has faced mounting criticism over a series of arrests and unexplained abductions and killings of political opponents.
Hassan has said the government is committed to respecting human rights, and ordered an investigation into reported abductions last year.
Spokespeople for Tanzania’s government, police force and immigration service did not respond to repeated requests for comment about Mwangi’s allegations of torture.
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Aaron Ross, Hereward Holland and Kevin Liffey)
