Death of an Archbishop

On this day in 1977 Archbishop Luwum of Uganda was martyred by Idi Amin. Here's the Time Magazine article from that year-

In the six years since he seized power from Milton Obote, Uganda's mercurial President Idi Amin has accused his enemies of scheming at least a dozen times to overthrow him, and in response has ordered the execution of untold thousands of opponents. Last week three newly discovered "plotters" met with suspiciously accidental deaths. Two of the accused were high government officials: Internal Affairs Minister Charles Oboth-Ofumbi and Land and Water Resources Minister Erinayo Oryema. The third was one of the most highly esteemed churchmen in all of Africa, the Most Rev. Janani Luwum, 53, Anglican Archbishop of Uganda.

In typical "Big Daddy" fashion, the dictator convened a giant rally in Kampala and invited the two ministers and the archbishop to attend. Then, a few lesser "suspects" were paraded forth to read out "confessions" implicating the three men. The archbishop smiled wanly and shook his head in disbelief when he heard his own name mentioned as one of the agents whom the exiled Milton Obote had chosen to help stage a coup. Amid soldiers' cries of "Kill them all!" a gracious Amin declared that, in all fairness, there would be "a proper military trial."

The rally, in fact, was the closest approach to a "hearing" that Archbishop Luwum and the two ministers would ever get. Next day, Radio Uganda reported that the prisoners had been killed when the car transporting them to an interrogation center collided with another vehicle and overturned; the victims, said the broadcast, had tried to overpower the driver in an attempt to escape.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918720,00.html