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Even before the rebel attack, Amin had charged that "imperialist and Zionist" powers were trying to assassinate him; now his suspicion focused on foreigners within the country. Shortly after the invasion, 22 reporters (16 British, two French, two Swedish, a West German and an American, A.P. Correspondent Andrew Torchia) were arrested by police and military security forces, some of them not to be heard from again for several days. At the same time, the army set up roadblocks at major intersections and began arresting all Asians and foreigners caught without proper identification papers. The lucky ones were prisoners of the police. Uganda's police force, still professional despite the dismissal of most of its top officers, herded all its European prisoners (61 at one point) into a cell block in the Kampala central police station. There were no beds, only one chair and four toilets. The prisoners, including a retired British diplomat, his crippled wife, and a family with two small children, had to sleep on the concrete floor, which was sticky with stale urine.
Yet the police treated them correctly and even politely. Food was served on silver trays from a nearby hotel. Smokers were supplied with cigarettes. According to French Television Correspondent Jean-Loup Demigneux, who spent 24 hours in the "black hole of Kampala," as reporters came to call it, the most terrifying moment was at 3 a.m., when four of Amin's soldiers marched in. Slightly drunk and obviously hostile, each of the four carried a pistol in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. They beat up a police guard who tried to stop them, but their only apparent mission was to wake up the prisoners and harass them. They stayed only a few minutes, but when they left, one shouted back, "You're lucky to be here and not with us."
Because the police had formally registered the prisoners, foreign embassies were able to locate their citizens (at week's end, all Americans and Britons had been released). Less fortunate were those who were taken to the Makindye military prison, a collection of one-story buildings behind a double fence of barbed wire four miles outside Kampala, where they were held incommunicado and witnessed scenes of almost casual brutality. A.P. Correspondent Torchia was missing for three days before the American embassy was able to locate him. After his release, he described how Ugandan soldiers pinned a man on the ground while a woman beat him with a rawhide whip until the blood ran. "The beating went on for minutes—forever, it seemed—before the crowd dispersed and the screaming stopped," he wrote. "None of us knew who the woman was or what the whipping was about."
The hostilities claimed the life of one American: Peace Corps Volunteer Louis Morton, 23, a schoolteacher from Houston, who had been driving with another Peace Corpsman, Robert Freed, along the road between Mbarara and Masaka on a game-spotting tour of nearby Queen Elizabeth National Park. They were unaware of the fighting until they ran into an army roadblock. According to Freed, the troops waved them through and then fired at them. Morton was killed instantly. Freed was taken prisoner but eventually set free.