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'Idi Amin's health deteriorating'


Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin remains in a coma and his health condition is deteriorating, an employee at the hospital where he is a patient said today.

Amin “came in with high blood pressure and since then has suffered kidney failure,” an employee at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, said, on condition of anonymity.

Amin, believed to be 80-years-old, was comatose upon admission to the hospital on July 18 and has remained on life-support since then.

His sons, who have been at his bedside in the hospital’s intensive care unit, have asked for privacy, saying they do not want any details released about their father’s condition.

Amin, whose brutal eight-year rule of Uganda was marked by the torture and murder of 200,000-plus people, has been living in exile in the Red Sea port city of Jiddah with members of his family.

Human rights groups say as many as 500,000 people were killed during Amin’s rule.

Yoweri Museveni, the current Ugandan president who was involved in the 1979 coup that ousted Amin, has said the former dictator would be prosecuted if he ever tried to return from exile.

New York-based Human Rights Watch described Amin as “one of the bloodiest tyrants in a bloody century” and said it regretted that he was dying without meeting justice for his crimes.

After his overthrow, Amin, a Muslim and member of the small Kakwa tribe from north-western Uganda, went into exile first in Libya, then Iraq before finally settling in Saudi Arabia on the condition that he stay out of politics.

Saudi officials have refused to comment on his exile.