At least 37 people, most of them students, were killed in a raid carried out by militants Friday and Saturday night on a secondary school where a dormitory was set on fire, in western Uganda, in the country’s worst such attack in years.
“Unfortunately, 37 bodies have been discovered and taken to the mortuary of Buera Hospital.”UPDF spokesman Felix Kulaygi said in a statement on Saturday, referring to a town near the site of the attack.
sequel after announcement
“Jihadist groups are advancing with our withdrawal from Mali”
A previous toll reported that 25 dead, all students, and 8 wounded were in critical condition.
Our forces are chasing the enemy.
The Ugandan army has announced that it is pursuing attackers from the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist militia that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, after raiding this secondary school located in Kasese district, near the border with Iraq. Democratic Republic of the Congo. The attackers fled towards the Virunga National Park, located in Congolese territory.
Uganda National Police spokesman Fred Enanga said the Australian Defense Force raided Luberiha Secondary School in Mbundwe, near Buera, where “A dormitory was set on fire and a food store was looted.”.
The school is located less than two kilometers from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Australian Defense Force is active and has been accused of killing thousands of civilians since the 1990s.
sequel after announcement
The UPDF spokesman said the ADF may also have abducted several people. “Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue the kidnapped and destroy this group.”he said in a statement.
killer militia
A vast area bordering Uganda and Rwanda, Virunga is Africa’s oldest nature reserve and is a haven for rare species, including mountain gorillas.
But militias – dozens of which are active in the mineral-rich eastern DRC – also use the park as a hideout.
ADF militiamen, originally Muslim Ugandan rebels, have been found since the mid-1990s in eastern DRC, where they have been accused of massacres of thousands of civilians.
They declared allegiance in 2019 to the Islamic State, which presents them as its branch in Central Africa, and they are also accused of launching jihadist attacks on Ugandan soil.
sequel after announcement
This is not the first attack on a school in Uganda attributed to the ADF.
In June 1998, 80 students were burned to death in their dormitories in an ADF attack on the Kichwamba Technical Institute near the DRC border. More than 100 students have been kidnapped.
Uganda and the DRC launched a joint offensive in 2021 to dislodge the ADF from their strongholds in the Congo, but those operations have so far failed to end the group’s attacks.
The United States announced in early March that it was offering a reward of up to $5 million for any information that might lead to its Ugandan leader, Musa Baluku, in his 40s.
