Canadian is among thousands who disappeared in South Sudan

Open this photo in gallery:

Richard Lokeya, a Canadian law student who had once been a child refugee, thought he had finally reached safety when he and two friends slipped across the border from South Sudan to Uganda on the night of Aug. 15, 2015.

For months, South Sudanese intelligence agents had accused him of supporting the opposition. He had even been arrested and briefly imprisoned for criticizing the government. Knowing he had to leave, he made plans to return to Canada through Uganda.

But within hours of reaching a Ugandan border town, Mr. Lokeya and his friends were arrested by Ugandan security forces and handed over to South Sudan’s military. A witness said he was tortured for days at a notorious detention site. Today, he is among the missing: The thousands of victims of South Sudan’s war whose fate has never been officially acknowledged.

“These unresolved cases are spreading fear and terror among the public,” Jehanne Henry, East Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a report released on Friday.

“The government needs to acknowledge that people are still missing and take concrete steps to investigate and hold those responsible to account.”

The report was released ahead of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, marked annually on Aug. 30 after the United Nations proclaimed it in 2010 in recognition of the growing number of involuntary disappearances worldwide, including arrests and abductions.

Few details are known about Mr. Lokeya, but The Globe and Mail has pieced together his story from South Sudanese media reports, Human Rights Watch researchers and a former government official who The Globe is not identifying because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

As a teen in the late 1990s, Richard Lokeya and his family were refugees, fleeing from the decades-long war in southern Sudan. He became a Canadian citizen, and in his early 30s, he was studying law in Ontario while occasionally visiting his parents in South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011.

He was there again in 2015, in the midst of South Sudan’s civil war, which has killed an estimated 400,000 people since it erupted in 2013. Documents from Ugandan security forces show that he was formally transferred to South Sudan’s military after his arrest in the Ugandan border town, the former official said.

According to reports by Human Rights Watch and South Sudanese media outlets, Mr. Lokeya and his two friends were taken to the “White House,” an infamous military detention site in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, on Aug. 18, 2015.

At the detention site, where hundreds of people were held in custody, Mr. Lokeya and his friends were reportedly tortured for days. They were jabbed with needles, kicked, beaten with rifle butts and forced to sit on a wooden chair with nails sticking out.

On Aug. 22, according to a witness who spoke later to South Sudanese media, Mr. Lokeya and his friends were strangled and dumped into the Nile River. But South Sudan’s authorities never acknowledged their deaths.

A report in the Sudan Tribune in 2015, quoting a survivor of the executions, said 20 people were strangled and dumped in the river on the same night.

A volunteer South Sudanese group, Remembering The Ones We Lost, has documented the names of 280 people who have gone missing since the beginning of the war in December, 2013. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported last year that more than 4,000 people are still missing since the war began.

The military or the national intelligence agency have been implicated in many of the disappearances, Human Rights Watch says. The organization gave details of more than a dozen examples in its report on Friday.

In one prominent case, human-rights activist Dong Samuel Luak and political opposition member Aggrey Ezbon Idri were abducted from the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, in January, 2017. Two years later, a report by a UN panel of experts concluded that the two were abducted by South Sudan’s intelligence agency, the National Security Service, and were probably executed on Jan. 30, 2017.

“South Sudan’s government has not investigated the disappearances of the men or ensured accountability for them,” Human Rights Watch said.

Our Morning Update and Evening Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.