Armed men kidnap 2 MTN contract workers

Heavily armed men in civilian clothing have kidnapped two employees of a contractor of MTN Uganda in the capital city Kampala and forced them to grant access to the company’s data centre, MTN said in a statement on Monday.

MTN said the armed men, who claimed to be security agents, kidnapped the employees on July 2, detained them in an un-gazetted area and later forced them to grant unauthorised physical access to the MTN Uganda’s Data Centre at Mutundwe.

“At the Data Centre, there were several attempts by the intruders, to log into MTN Uganda’s servers over a period of two hours.

“The efforts were unsuccessful because of MTN Uganda’s robust information security systems and no data was accessed or compromised by the intruders,” the company said.

“These incidents were captured on our CCTV cameras and the footage has been shared with the police,” MTN
said.

The telecommunication company said after the incident was reported to the minister of security and chief of military intelligence, the intruders withdrew from the data centre.

The nature and motive of the intrusion remains unclear, and the firm has said that it is awaiting police
investigation.