A Ugandan soldier captured by Al shabaab in Somalia more than a year ago has been paraded in an insurgent video in which he appealed for his country’s leaders to help free him.
“Please do not abandon me here,” he said in the video released on Monday by the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab insurgency.
“Oh Ugandans, I am a soldier of your country. Join hands and come up with a solution that can secure my release.”
The bearded soldier was identified as Massasa M.Y. He wore a uniform with a Ugandan army patch on it and said he was captured during a deadly 2015 attack on an African Union in Janale, about 90 km (55 miles) south of the capital, Mogadishu.
About 40 to 50 of his colleagues were killed in the attack, the soldier said.
Ugandan military spokesman Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda confirmed the man in the video is a Ugandan soldier but declined to give any details.
Some 22,000 African Union troops are in Somalia supporting the Western-backed government. It is unclear whether the insurgent group, which has mounted several attacks on AU bases in the past two years, has any other African Union soldiers as prisoners.