Was It Disrespect Or Protocol? Gaddafi’s Trained Guards Push Museveni Like A Peasant Infront Of His SFC Guards – Throw Back

The Presidential Guard Brigade and Col. Muammar Gadaffi’s security detail were involved in a string of supremacy clashes during every public event that the deceased Libyan leader attended in 2008, it can now be revealed.

During the clashes, security officials on both sides just fell short of pulling guns on each other, but both presidents seemed to be aware of the goings-on between their security outfits. Several of the guards to the visiting heads of state from Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Mali, Somalia, Sudan and Djibouti sustained serious injuries in the fight, which included punches, kicks and the drawing of guns.

No leaders were hurt in the melee, though several were knocked over. Several journalists also were caught up in the fracas and suffered injuries or lost their grips on cameras and recorders.The incident occurred at the opening of a massive Gadhafi National Mosque in Kampala, a structure begun by the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 1972 and completed with financing from Libya, according to African media reports.

Minutes after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and his host, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, jointly unveiled a plaque to mark the event, the Libyan guards pushed away the guards of other delegations at the mosque’s entrance in 2008.The Ugandan guards — who had traded hostilities with the predominantly-Arab Libyan guards at every joint event since Gadhafi’s arrival in the country — reacted with fury and fought back.

Museveni briefly lost his balance when a hefty Libyan guard pushed him to a wall. Another Libyan guard pushed Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who also lost his balance but was caught by his own guards.The vice president of Tanzania was knocked over by fighting guards as he was taking his shoes off to enter the mosque. Guards to the rest of the visiting presidents and prime ministers kept their respective leaders out of the fray, with some drawing their guns as the dignitaries looked on in disbelief.

Some leaders — notably those from Somalia, Burundi and Djibouti — were visibly uneasy as guns were drawn on all sides.By the time the fight was over more than six minutes later, about a dozen presidential guards were left bleeding from compound fractures and the Libyan and Ugandan protocol officials traded bitter accusations of disrespect and racism.”What are your people up to? Do you want to kill our leader?” A Libyan protocol official said to his Ugandan counterpart.

The Ugandan official, who declined to be named, shouted back, “Why do think you’re superior? What makes you think Uganda has any ill intention against Gadhafi?”The Ugandan official said Museveni’s guards were simply doing their job as security for the host country and had a right to respond when the Libyan guards pushed them back.It had taken 36 years to complete the giant mosque on a hill in the heart of Kampala.

It used to be a colonial fort named after British Capt. Frederick Lugard.The mosque now accommodates as many as 17,000 people at one time, according to the engineers, who call it the largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa.Many Muslims interviewed said the mosque’s opening evoked sweet memories of Amin, the deceased dictator.