 "Billionaire Pankaj Oswal's daughter speaks out about Ugandan arrest ordeal")
Vasundhara Oswal, daughter of Indian billionaire Pankaj Oswal, has spoken out about her experience in Uganda, where she was allegedly detained for five days and subsequently arrested for two weeks after being accused of kidnapping and murdering her father’s employee.
Talking to news agency PTI, Vasundhara stated that her human rights were violated by Ugandan authorities. She was accused of kidnapping and murdering Mukesh Menaria, an employee of her father. However, Menaria was later found alive in Tanzania.
“My human rights were grossly violated. For example, when they proceeded to raid the site, they did not have a search warrant,” Vasundhara said. “When I asked them to present a search warrant, they said, ‘We’re in Uganda. We can do anything. You're not in Europe anymore,' and they basically proceeded to raid,” she added.
She recounted that Ugandan police forced her to accompany them to the Interpol office under the pretext of meeting a senior official. “I did not want to do [this] that same day,” Vasundhara said.
A male officer then allegedly forced her into a police van, telling her, “No, you have to come today only. It's not going to happen tomorrow anytime otherwise."
She was subsequently taken to Interpol, where she was compelled to give a statement while being assisted by a civil lawyer instead of a criminal lawyer. “They didn't give time for us to even arrange a lawyer as they said that if I didn't give a statement then I would be held indefinitely,” she said.
Following this, Vasundhara was placed in a cell and asked to provide $30,000 along with her passport in exchange for a police bond. “I obliged but I didn't get a police bond. They threw me back inside the same cell,” she recalled.
Despite presenting an unconditional release order from the court the next day, she was not released and remained in detention for an additional 72 hours.
“All this while, I didn't know what I was being detained for,” she said. She was later brought before a lower magistrate’s court, where she was charged with "kidnap with attempt to murder", despite her claim that such charges could only be filed in a high court in Uganda.
Vasundhara was initially held in a prison with individuals convicted of minor crimes before being transferred to another facility that housed criminals convicted of serious offenses, including murder and human trafficking. “I spent the next two weeks of my ordeal in [that] prison,” she said.
“Even after [police] found that [Menaria] was alive, they still proceeded to keep me in prison on those charges. They found him on October 10, about a week to two weeks before I got bail,” Vasundhara said.
She also alleged that her business rivals had bribed nearly 20 lawyers she had hired to defend her. She was granted bail on October 21.
(With agency inputs)