NAIROBIKenya, June 9, 2021 (Morning Star News) – A Christian employee’s Muslim supervisor sent people to kill him last month in eastern Uganda after he refused to convert to Islam, sources said.

Christians at the funeral of evangelist Fred Isiko, who drove a van for Ashirafu Kasenyi’s cargo transport company, said Kasenyi was behind the killing of Isiko on May 22 in Kagumu village, Kibuku District.

On May 23 police arrested a suspect who said Kasenyi had sent him to kill Isiko, sources said. That day Kasenyi was killed when a mob of more than 50 angry residents, most of them members of churches, attacked him.

When Kasenyi on the evening of May 22 called Isiko to meet with him, the Christian known for proclaiming Christ within and outside church walls got friend Francis Maka to accompany him, Maka said.

“When we met Kasenyi, he gave Fred some money to go and buy some meat at Kadama trading center and to bring it back for supper so as to have a business discussion the following day,” Maka told Morning Star News. “As we were about to reach the trading center, three people stopped us. They said that they have some information for Fred. So I moved at a distance, and immediately one of them removed a long knife and cut his neck as I fled for my life and reported the incident at Kagumu police post.”

Police and hundreds of people converged around Isiko’s body early the next morning, he said.

Earlier in the month Isiko secretly recorded a conversation on his phone in which Kasenyi, a Muslim teacher known as a sheikh, threatened to fire him if he refused to convert to Islam, a relative said.

“You need to convert to Islam if you are to remain as my employee,” Kasenyi says in the May 7 recording, the relative said. Isiko replies, “I am not going to leave Jesus Christ; better to resign than leave Christianity.”

After Isiko was killed, police arrested a suspect who said Kasenyi contracted him and four others to kill Isiko and seven pastors, Maka and others said.

Kibuku police rang Kagumu police ordering them to arrest Kasenyi, but before they could do so community members went to his home and killed him, sources said. They also destroyed his house, gardens and livestock, they said.

Police have arrested just one unidentified suspect in the killing of Kasenyi, sources said. Kasenyi, also known as Kasenyi Jackson, had been a Christian until converting to Islam in 1992.

HOUSE DESTROYED

Also in Kibuku District, Muslim relatives of a newly believing Christian on May 23 burned down his family’s house in Nansyono village.

The attack came after Louis Levi Baula, 46, took his 3-year-old son to a church service on May 2 for healing from seizures and other symptoms.

“Our sheikh had been praying for the child, and we had spent 350,000 Uganda shillings [US$100] given to the sheikh as well as spending a large amount for the treatment of the child in various hospitals, but all in vain,” Baula told Morning Star News.

The pastor of the church, unidentified for security reasons, was initially alarmed by the family as they arrived in their Islamic attire, and he directed ushers to question them, Baula said.