FORT PORTAL – The death toll in a deadly attack on a school in western Uganda’s Mpondwe town – Kasese has risen to over 40, with an unknown number of people abducted, officials confirmed on Saturday.
The victims included students, one guard and two members of the local community who were killed outside the school, Mpondwe-Lhubiriha Mayor Selevest Mapoze told media on Saturday.
Ugandan authorities confirmed the recovery of the bodies of 41 people, including 38 students, who were burned; shot or hacked to death after suspected rebels, attacked a secondary school near the country’s border with Congo.
At least six people were abducted by the rebels, who fled across the porous border into Congo after the raid on Friday night, according to the Ugandan military.
The victims included the students, one guard and two members of the local community who were killed outside the school, Mpondwe-Lhubiriha Mayor Selevest Mapoze told the media.
Mapoze said that some of the students suffered fatal burns when the rebels set fire to a dormitory and others were shot or hacked with machetes.
The raid, which happened around 11:30 p.m., involved about five attackers, the Ugandan military said. Soldiers from a nearby brigade who responded to the attack found the school on fire, ‘with dead bodies of students lying in the compound,’ noted UPDF spokesman Brig. Felix Kulayigye in a statement issued on Saturday.
That statement cited 37 bodies, with eight other people wounded and being treated at a local hospital. Ugandan troops are ‘pursuing the perpetrators to rescue the abducted students’ who were forced to carry looted food toward Congo’s Virunga National Park, it said.
Ugandan authorities said the Allied Democratic Forces – ADF, an extremist group that has been launching attacks for years from its bases in volatile eastern Congo, carried out the raid on Lhubiriha Secondary School in the border town of Mpondwe. The school, co-ed and privately owned, is located in the Ugandan district of Kasese, about 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) from the Congo border.
Joe Walusimbi – the Kasese RDC noted that some victims ‘were burnt beyond recognition.’
Winnie Kiiza, an influential political leader in the area and a former lawmaker, condemned the incident terming it, ‘cowardly attack’ through her Twitter handle. She noted that “attacks on schools were unacceptable and were a grave violation of children’s rights.”
The ADF has been accused of launching many attacks in recent years targeting civilians in remote parts of eastern Congo. The shadowy group rarely claims responsibility for attacks.
The ADF has long opposed the rule of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a U.S. security ally who has held power in this East African country since 1986.
The group was established in the early 1990s by some Ugandan Muslims, who said they had been side-lined by Museveni’s policies. At the time, the rebels staged deadly attacks in Ugandan villages as well as in the capital, including a 1998 attack in which 80 students were massacred in a town not from the scene of the latest attack.
A Ugandan military assault later forced the ADF into eastern Congo, where many rebel groups are able to operate because the central government has limited control there.
The group has since established ties with the Islamic State group.
In March, at least 19 people were killed in Congo by suspected ADF extremists.
Ugandan authorities for years have vowed to track down ADF militants even outside Ugandan territory. In 2021, Uganda launched joint air and artillery strikes in Congo against the group.
- Agencies
