Idi Amin, the dictator who torture and eat the parts of his victims, was reported to have died in exile in Jeddah.
News update from CNN -
Ugandan dictator Idi Amin diesSaturday, August 16, 2003 Posted: 0822 GMT ( 4:22 PM HKT)(CNN) -- Former Ugandan military ruler Idi Amin, blamed for tens of thousands of murders in the 1970s, has died in a Saudi Arabia hospital, according to medical officials.
Ugandan officials say Amin was 80, although his birth year is also listed as 1925. Amin, who had lived for years in exile in the port city of Jeddah, had been on a life-support machine since July 18 after slipping into a coma.
Amin was overweight and suffered from hypertension and fatigue in recent years, said David Kibirige, a senior reporter for the Ugandan newspaper The Monitor. Later, hospital staff said he suffered kidney failure.
He died at 8:20 a.m. on Saturday at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, The Associated Press quoted one unnamed official as saying.
A one-time heavyweight boxing champ and soldier in the British colonial army, Amin seized power in a military coup on January 25, 1971, overthrowing President Milton Obote while he was abroad.
Amin's rule was marked by extreme nationalism. He ordered the persecution of several Ugandan tribal groups and kicked out all Asians from Uganda in 1972, an action blamed for the collapse of the country's economy.
The dictator was also personally involved in the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French airliner to Entebbe.
According to the CIA World Factbook during his eight years in power Amin's "dictatorial regime" was "responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 opponents."
Human rights groups say that figure is much higher, arguing that as many as 500,000 people were killed or simply disappeared under his rule.
Exiles said he kept severed heads in the fridge, fed corpses to crocodiles and had one of his wives dismembered. He was also accused of cannibalism.
Amin was forced from power in 1979 by a combined force of Ugandan exiles and the Tanzanian army. He fled to Libya, then Iraq and finally Saudi Arabia, where he was allowed to settle provided he stayed out of politics.
His family had asked Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to allow him to return home to Uganda to die, David Kibirige of Ugandan newspaper The Monitor told CNN.
However, the Ugandan government said he would still face arrest and would have to answer for his crimes. Officials also rebuffed his family's request to allow him to be buried in his homeland, according to his relatives.
A convert to Islam, Amin had spent the past decade living with his four wives in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities granted him asylum and a government stipend.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Ugandan-Asian newspaper columnist whose family was among those Amin expelled, said the Saudis should have brought him to justice.
"I think it is a disgrace that Saudi Arabia gave him the kind of life they did and the excuse is he was a Muslim. They should have delivered him into the hands of international justice and they never did," she told Sky News television.
"And for the families of all those victims, black African families, this is going to be something they'll never forgive."
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/08/16/saudi.amin/index.htmlProfile of a Dictatorhttp://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/08/16/amin.obituary/index.html