Militants kill 37, abduct six others in attack on Ugandan school, says military
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A boy is comforted at the scene of an attack at the Lhubiriha Secondary School in Mpondwe, Uganda.
PHOTO: AFP
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KAMPALA – Militants linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria terror group killed 37 people and abducted six others in an attack on a school in western Uganda near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the military said on Saturday.
Military personnel found the bodies of the dead when they arrived at the school, defence spokesman Felix Kulayigye said in a statement.
“Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted and destroy this group,” he said earlier on Twitter.
The attackers, from the rebel group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), fled towards Virunga National Park in Congo, the police said.
The police said eight other people were in hospital with critical injuries after the attack at the Lhubiriha Secondary School in Mpondwe.
Privately owned NTV Uganda television said on Twitter that the death toll stood at 41, while state-run New Vision newspaper said it was 42.
New Vision said 39 of the dead were students, and that some of those killed died when the attackers set off a bomb as they fled.
Neither the police nor military specified how many of the dead were schoolchildren.
The assailants, numbering about five, burned down a dormitory and stole food, the authorities said.
Major-General Dick Olum, the army’s commander for western Uganda and in charge of a military deployment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said the attackers had stayed in the town two days before the attack, marking their target.
He said an unidentified youngster had gone to the school to check its layout before the attack.
“That is how the attackers came and locked the boys’ door. The boys really tried to fight back, but they were overpowered. The attackers had lit mattresses,” Maj-Gen Olum told reporters from Mpondwe, according to a video posted on Twitter by the Daily Monitor newspaper. “In the girls’ dorm, they found their door open... killing them and cutting them.”
In the 1990s, the ADF rebels launched their insurgency against President Yoweri Museveni from an initial base in the Rwenzori Mountains.
The group was largely defeated by the Ugandan military but remnants fled across the border into the vast jungles of eastern Congo from whence they have since maintained their insurgency – perpetrating attacks on civilian and military targets in both Congo and Uganda.
In April, the ADF attacked a village in eastern Congo, killing at least 20 people. REUTERS
