KAMPALA, Uganda — Ugandan authorities have recovered the bodies of 41 people, including 38 students, who were burned, shot or stabbed to death after an alleged rebel attack on a secondary school near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the mayor said Saturday.
At least six people were kidnapped by the rebels, who fled across the porous border into Congo after Friday night’s raid, the Ugandan army said.
Among the victims were students, a guard and two members of the local community who were killed outside the center, Mpondwe-Lhubiriha councilor Selevest Mapoze told The Associated Press.
Some of the students suffered fatal burns when rebels set a dormitory on fire, while others were shot or slashed with machetes, Mapoze added.
The attack, which occurred around 11:30 p.m., involved about five assailants, the army said. Soldiers from a nearby brigade who responded to the attack found the school on fire, “with the corpses of students lying on the campus,” army spokesman Brigadier Felix Kulayigye said in a statement.
In its note, the army reported 47 bodies and noted that eight wounded were being treated at a local hospital. Ugandan soldiers “are chasing the attackers to rescue the hostages” who were forced to bring looted food to the Virunga National Park in Congolese territory, he added.
The authorities said that the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an extremist group that has been launching attacks from its bases in the volatile eastern region of the neighboring country for years, carried out the attack at Lhubiriha High School in the border town. of Mpondwe,
The school, which is a private, co-educational facility, is in Ugandan’s Kasese district, about 1.2 miles from the border.
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Some of the victims “were burned beyond recognition,” Joe Walusimbi, an official representing the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, told The Associated Press by phone in Kasese.
Winnie Kiiza, an influential political leader, condemned the “cowardly attack” on Twitter. She noted that “attacks on schools are unacceptable and are a serious violation of children’s rights,” adding that schools should always be “a safe place for all students.”
The elusive ADF have been accused of launching numerous attacks against civilians in recent years in remote areas of eastern Congo, rarely claiming responsibility for an attack. The group opposes the Museveni government, a US security ally in power since 1986.
The militia was created in the early 1990s by some Ugandan Muslims who claimed to have been marginalized by Museveni’s policies. At the time, rebels were carrying out deadly attacks both in towns across the country and in the capital, Kampala, including the 1998 massacre that killed 80 students in a village not far from the scene of the latest incident.
Later, an army operation led the ADF to flee to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where many rebel groups operate due to the Congolese government’s limited control over the area.
Since then, he has established ties with the extremist group Islamic State.
In March, a suspected ADF attack killed 19 people in Congo.
The Ugandan authorities have vowed for years to capture the rebel group’s fighters both inside and outside its borders. In 2021, Uganda launched joint air and artillery strikes on the neighboring country against the militia.
