Susan Magara’s Nine Killers — and How State Used Phone Conversations and Land and Car Transactions to Pin Them

KAMPALA, Uganda — It began with a phone call.

On a February evening in 2018, Susan Magara, a 28-year-old businesswoman and daughter of a prominent Kampala businessman, was chatting with a friend outside her home in the suburb of Lungujja. Their conversation was ordinary until it wasn’t.

The friend, Yusuf Muhindo, suddenly heard a struggle on the other end of the line.

Then came Magara’s desperate cry.

“Temunkuba.”

“Don’t beat me.”

The line went dead.

For nearly three weeks afterward, Uganda watched one of the country’s most agonizing criminal dramas unfold in real time. A young woman had vanished from outside her home. Her abductors demanded an enormous ransom. They negotiated with her family, taunted investigators and sent horrifying proof that she was alive—and suffering. Even after the money was paid, they killed her.

The case would become more than a murder investigation. It exposed the growing sophistication of ransom-for-hire criminal networks, shook public confidence in security agencies and left affluent families questioning whether anyone was truly safe.

On Monday, more than eight years after that haunting phone call, Uganda’s High Court brought the country’s most infamous ransom killing case to its most significant legal conclusion.

In an 84-page judgment, Justice Alex Ajiji convicted nine people of kidnapping Magara with the intention of extracting a massive ransom before murdering her, concluding a trial that consumed years of painstaking investigations, forensic analysis and courtroom testimony.

“Accordingly, I agree with the three court assessors that the prosecution has proved the case against each of you, and you are convicted as charged,” Justice Ajiji ruled.

The judge deferred sentencing until Tuesday. Under Uganda’s Penal Code Act, a murder conviction carries a maximum sentence of death by hanging.

Those convicted are Yusuf Lubega, Mahad Kisalita, Ismail Bukenya, Abubaker Kyewokya, Hassan Wasswa, Abbas Musa Buwembo, Hussein Kato Miiro, Hajjara Nakandi and Muzamir Ssali. Throughout the lengthy proceedings, all nine maintained that they were innocent.

The Night Everything Changed

The events reconstructed in court began on the evening of February 7, 2018.

Magara had driven home and was speaking to Muhindo on her mobile phone when she was ambushed outside her residence.

Muhindo testified that the conversation was abruptly interrupted by sounds of a violent confrontation before Magara screamed, “Temunkuba,” moments before the call disconnected.

When investigators reached the scene, they found her Toyota RAV4 abandoned.

Its engine was still running.

Her mobile phones remained inside the vehicle.

For Justice Ajiji, the physical evidence reinforced what Muhindo had heard over the telephone.

“The screaming by the deceased and the abandoned vehicle with its engine still running prove beyond reasonable doubt that she was forcefully abducted,” the judge wrote.

From that moment, investigators believed they were dealing not with a disappearance but with a carefully planned kidnapping.

Negotiating With Terror

The following day, the kidnappers made contact.

Their initial demand was staggering—$1 million.

As negotiations continued, the amount was eventually reduced to $200,000, roughly Shs700 million.

According to prosecutors, initial attempts to collect the ransom between February 15 and February 17 failed after the kidnappers suspected police surveillance.

Then the family received a package that transformed an already horrifying kidnapping into one of Uganda’s most disturbing criminal cases.

Inside were two of Magara’s severed fingers.

Also enclosed was a flash drive containing a video showing Magara pleading with her father to pay the ransom.

Forensic evidence later established that she was alive when the fingers were amputated.

Justice Ajiji said the act was intended to terrorize the family into surrendering the money.

“The severed fingers demonstrated the kidnappers’ determination to procure a ransom through intimidation,” he observed.

Days later, relatives delivered the ransom money at Kanaaba in Ndejje.

They hoped payment would secure her freedom.

Instead, four days later, Magara’s body was discovered at Kitiko-Birongo near the Entebbe Expressway.

A postmortem examination concluded that she died from asphyxia caused by manual strangulation.

The Long Search for Answers

Unlike many murder trials that hinge on a confession or eyewitness testimony, the prosecution spent years assembling what became a vast mosaic of scientific, digital and circumstantial evidence.

During the proceedings, prosecutors called 45 witnesses, while the court summoned an additional witness from the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA). The defence presented 20 witnesses.

Justice Ajiji concluded that the evidence pointed overwhelmingly in one direction.

DNA analysis linked suspects to critical exhibits.

Digital forensic evidence reconstructed movements and communications.

Telephone records mapped contacts before, during and after the kidnapping.

Crime scene findings corroborated witness accounts.

Among the prosecution’s most consequential witnesses was telecommunications forensic expert Frank Nyakairu, whose analysis demonstrated that the accused communicated frequently before, during and after the kidnapping.

Investigators also testified that some of the accused led detectives to locations central to the crime—including the place where Magara had been held captive, sites earmarked for collecting the ransom and the location where her body had been abandoned.

To the court, those discoveries strengthened the prosecution’s argument that the accused possessed intimate knowledge of the crime.

Financial investigators uncovered another striking pattern.

Several of the convicted individuals acquired expensive assets—including land and motor vehicles—shortly after the ransom had been paid.

Justice Ajiji dismissed their explanations.

“The explanations regarding the source of funds were vague and unsupported by evidence. The rapid acquisition of property shortly after the ransom strongly points to proceeds from the crime,” Justice Ajiji said.

A Carefully Planned Conspiracy

The judgment concluded that the accused acted with a common intention from beginning to end.

Justice Ajiji found that they jointly planned Magara’s abduction, held her captive for nearly three weeks while ransom negotiations continued, tortured her and ultimately killed her to eliminate a key witness after receiving the ransom.

Yet the case remains incomplete.

Two suspected masterminds of the operation, Yakub Byensi and Hakim Lugolobi, remain at large.

Their whereabouts are unknown.

The Legacy of a Crime

Long before Monday’s verdict, Susan Magara’s kidnapping had already entered Uganda’s modern history.

The case sent shockwaves across the country, prompting heightened security operations and direct involvement from President Yoweri Museveni as pressure mounted on investigators to dismantle the criminal network behind the abduction.

It also altered the way many Ugandans viewed personal security. Business executives became more cautious. Families adopted new routines. Conversations about kidnapping for ransom, once uncommon, entered everyday life.

Outside the courtroom, the verdict represented the culmination of years of work by investigators and prosecutors determined to solve one of Uganda’s most complex criminal cases.

Soon after the judgment, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) welcomed the outcome, stating that “justice has been served.”

For Magara’s family, the verdict cannot erase the events of those three weeks in February 2018.

But it closes a legal chapter that remained open for more than eight years.

The phone call that began with an ordinary conversation ended with a frightened young woman crying out for mercy.

On Monday, a court finally answered the questions that followed.

It could not bring Susan Magara back.

But after years of waiting, painstaking investigations and courtroom testimony, it delivered what Uganda’s justice system believed had long been overdue: accountability for one of the country’s most haunting crimes.

In another murder case, a suspect shocked court by naming former police chief Gen Kale Kayihura as being behind the assassination of Joan Kagezi and that a key suspect who ‘wanted’ Kagezi’s daughter stole her phone and installed a tracking device, while another claimed that Shs500,000 was given to him for Joan Kagezi killing. (See Details Here and There).