Monday, August 6, 2007

Amin’s son jailed over murder in the UK

JAILED: Idi Amin's son Faisal Wangita

It’s always once in a while that Rafshizzle chooses a sad story and this is one of them…
The world has been hit by yet another horrible story from the Amin family after it has been revealed by a UK court that a man jailed over the killing of a Somali youth is the son of former Ugandan military leader Idi Amin.
On Saturday all UK newspapers run the story of Faisal Wangita, 25, who was one of 13 men convicted over the killing of Mahir Osman in January 2006.
He has been sentenced to five years’ detention, which is the smallest punishment as compared to fellow culprits.
Ismail Mohamed, 20, of Haringey, Liban Elmi, 20, of Wood Green, and Hussein Ali Hussein, 17, Enfield, were found guilty of murder and jailed for 15, 14 and 10 years.
However, Liban Elmi and Ismail Mohamed were guilty of murder and were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mr Osman was stabbed 20 times, attacked with baseball bats, bottles and hammers, punched and kicked, the trial heard.
And according to the Reuters, Wangita “the son of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was one of a gang of men jailed for stabbing a teenager to death near an underground station in London, a judge revealed on Friday.”
Born in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, where Amin was living in exile, Wangita is believed to be the third child of the dictator’s fifth and favourite wife, Sarah Amin.
And The Guardian reported that Ms Amin nicknamed “Suicide Sarah” after her time as a go-go dancer in the Ugandan Army’s Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band, lives with her two daughters and Wangita in Tottenham, north London.
Prosecutors said the violence was the culmination of a series of incidents between rival Somali gangs, the North London Somalis, of which Wangita supported and the Centric Boys gang, of which Osman was a member.
Closed circuit television footage showed the mechanical engineering student being attacked with knives, bottles, hammers and scaffolding poles in front of horrified onlookers.
In May, Wangita was cleared of murder by an Old Bailey jury but found guilty of conspiracy to wound, conspiracy to possess offensive weapons and violent disorder in connection with the fatal attack.
Described as a fitness instructor, Wangita’s papers said he was born in Uganda but he told police he was born in Saudi Arabia.
His lawyer revealed at an earlier hearing that his father was the former Ugandan dictator, blamed for the murder of tens of thousands of people during his rule between 1971 and 1979.
But Wangita’s relationship to Amin was kept from the jury at London’s Old Bailey criminal court after judge Stephen Kramer decided it would be prejudicial.
It was made public only on Friday after the judge lifted a banning order on the media following the conviction of the final five members of the gang charged over the killing.
Amin had at least four wives and is believed to have had around 43 children.
The most bizarre part of this story is that Idi Amin was Ugandan yet his son joined a Somali gang in England although Wangita and mother Sarah are citizens of Tottenham, north London.
Sarah married Amin at a sumptuous wedding ceremony in Uganda in 1975, which cost an estimated £2 million. The groom’s best man was Yasser Arafat (RIP), the late Palestinian leader.
Amin - who later called himself Field Marshal, King of Scotland and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa - cut the wedding cake with a sword in a ceremony, which attracted international attention. But four years later the dictator’s lavish lifestyle was abruptly brought to an end when he was overthrown by Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles after one of the bloodiest rules in African history.
Amin and some of his family fled first to Libya and then on to Saudi Arabia. In 1982, a year after Wangita’s birth, Sarah Amin left her husband, taking her children with her, and sought political asylum in Germany, where she worked as a model.
After moving to London, she supported her children by running a cafe serving African dishes. In 1997 environmental health officials briefly closed down the restaurant in Forest Gate, east London, and Ms Amin was fined for poor kitchen hygiene.
Until his death in 2003, Amin lived in Jeddah, out of reach of human rights groups and the new Ugandan regime, both of which were keen to prosecute him for the deaths of an estimated 300,000 Ugandans.
Wangita grew up in north London, and fell in with a Somali gang known as the Tottenham Somalis. As a member of the gang he clashed with Mr Osman, who was associated with a rival gang known as the Centric Boys of Camden Town.
Wangita stayed at a number of addresses in London. He arrived in England some time ago and was living here legally with his mother.
He had previous criminal convictions for possessing an offensive weapon, theft, fraud and threatening behaviour.
This is no joke matter, otherwise I would be penning another movie titled, “The Last King of Somalia…”

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