The wanted deputy of Uganda's murderous Lord's Resistance Army rebels, Okot Odhiambo, may have been killed in recent fighting, the Ugandan defence minister says.
Odhiambo was indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2005 along with LRA chief Joseph Kony and fellow rebel Dominic Ongwen on charges of butchering and kidnapping civilians.
"There are pointers from defectors that Okot Odhiambo may be dead," Defence Minister Crispus Kiyonga told AFP on Friday.
"Our forces are verifying these reports to check if indeed he died in the battles we have had with them and a position will be communicated."
In recent years the group, a militant outfit whose doctrine mixes African mysticism with Christian extremism, has been forced out of Uganda and Odhiambo had been thought to be hiding out with fighters in the remote jungles of Central African Republic, northeast Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan.
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Ugandan army spokesman Paddy Ankunda said the intelligence reports had come from rebel defectors, who said the rebel commander may have died in a Ugandan army assault "at the end of last year", but gave no details on where the clash took place.
According to the ICC warrant, former LRA members describe Odiambo as a "ruthless killer" and "the one who killed the most".
Odhiambo is widely suspected to have directed the killing of some 300 civilians during a February 2004 attack on the Barlonyo internally displaced persons camp in northern Uganda.
After Odhiambo reportedly ordered the rebels to "kill every living thing", witnesses say camp residents were burnt alive in their homes, hacked to death with machetes, stabbed, bludgeoned and shot as they tried to escape.
