Robert Siedle

The Killer squads murdered two Americans, Nicholas Stroh a journalist and heir to the stroh Brewery in Detroit, and Rober Siedle, a sociologist who had been studying the care of the elderly in Arica while teaching at Makerere University in Kampala. Years later, Siedle's son who was 16 when Amin came to power - reported that he had been living with his father in Uganda at the time. He also disclosed that his dad had come to know Amin before he took total control of the country and ws initially impressed with him.

Rumours of unspeakable cruelty such as murder, torture and rape, committed by amin and his poorly disciplined army, began to circulate in the months that followed Amin's putsch. About then his father and Stroh became suspicious of the thunderingly gregarious general:

When rumours that hundreds of soldiers at the army's Mbarara Barracks, some 250 Km outside of Kampala had been slaughtered on June 22 1971, filtered through to Kampala they set out into the African bush to seek confirmation of the atrocity.

So on July 7th 1971, the two men cranked up a battered pale-blue VW station wagon with a hand-written "Press" sign attached to the windshield and drove off into the tangled heartland of Uganda, never to be seen again. Their disappearance alerted the world for the first time of the policy of mass murder of the amin government that came to be referred to by the International Commission of Jurists as Amin's reign of terror.