The High Court yesterday wrapped up the evidence of the first prosecution witness, Andrew Wilson Orlando, in the treason case against Rtd. Col. Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Hajji Obeid Kamulegeya Lutale and Captain Dennish Oyaa Oola. The three are accused of plotting to overthrow government and assassinate the President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
State Prosecutor Richard Birivumbuka re-examined Orlando to answer questions raised during cross-examination by Lutale’s lawyers, specifically why he merged all the secret recordings into one file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Orlando told court it was not to tamper with them, but to reduce their file size. He said he uploaded them to a “high cloud” so he could easily send them to Uganda and also pass through security checks at JKIA in Nairobi without being stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After that, his testimony was formally closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The State immediately called its second witness, Medard Erisa Ssentanda, a senior lecturer of linguistics at Makerere University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ssentanda told court that the CID contacted Makerere’s translation unit through its deputy director and gave them a flash disk with the recordings. The disk had 5 folders, each folder was a different meeting held in Geneva and Athens, and in total the audio and video was 29 hours, 21 minutes and 3 seconds long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their job was to transcribe everything from audio\/video into written English. They charged Shs 70,000 per minute and were paid Shs 59.32 million in total.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Defence lawyer Farouk Kizito Kamulegeya for Lutale objected. He told Judge Emmanuel Baguma that no one knows where the original recordings came from, the defence has never seen the flash disk, and the recordings themselves were never formally disclosed before Ssentanda started testifying. He argued that is illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prosecutor Birivumbuka replied that the flash disk is not the evidence \u2014 the transcribed report is. So the objection is weak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judge Baguma did not make a decision. He pushed the ruling to Tuesday, 23rd September, when he will decide whether Ssentanda’s transcription can stay on record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The High Court has closed the evidence of the first prosecution witness in the treason case against Rtd. Col. Dr. Kiiza Besigye and two others, as the defence raises objections over the transcription of secret recordings presented by the second witness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[16,14,17,15,13,19,20,18],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-court-justice","tag-andrew-wilson-orlando","tag-besigye-treason-trial","tag-farouk-kizito-kamulegeya","tag-high-court-uganda","tag-kiiza-besigye","tag-medard-erisa-ssentanda","tag-treason-trial","tag-uganda-courts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gugudde.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}