At least 37 students were killed in an attack attributed to the Islamic State jihadist group on a school in western Uganda, authorities said today.
“37 bodies were found and taken to the Bwera hospital morgue,” Ugandan army spokesman Felix Kulayigye said in a statement, referring to the town near where the attack took place.
In a previous balance, the police spokesman, Fred Enanga, had reported 25 deaths.
Enanga explained that the ADF (Democratic Allied Forces) militia, which has its stronghold in eastern DRC, last night attacked a secondary school near Bwera, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where “it set fire to a dormitory and ransacked a grocery store.”
“All those killed so far have been confirmed to be students at the school,” aged 16 or older, said Joe Walusimbi, commissioner for the Kasese district, where the school is located, about 2 kilometers from the border.
The police spokesman said that eight victims were also rescued alive, who “are in a critical situation at the Bwera hospital,” the AFP news agency reported.
Several students are still missing, Walusimbi said.
The army and the police chase the attackers who fled towards the Virunga National Park, located on the other side of the border, in the DRC, where the ADF are located.
Uganda People’s Defense Forces (armed forces) spokesman Felix Kulayigye said the attackers may have taken several people abducted.
“Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue the abductees and destroy this group,” Kulayigye said in a statement.
The ADF militia began as an insurgent group in the predominantly Muslim Uganda and settled in eastern DRC in the mid-1990s. Since then it has been accused of killing thousands of civilians.
In 2019 they swore allegiance to the Islamic State group, which presents ADF fighters as a local branch in Central Africa. They are accused of jihadist attacks in the DRC and on Ugandan soil.
This weekend is not the first attack on a school in Uganda attributed to the ADF.
In June 1998, 80 students were burned alive in their dormitories during an ADF attack on the Kichwamba Technical Institute near the DRC border. More than 100 students were kidnapped.
Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo launched a joint offensive in 2021 to drive the ADF out of their Congolese strongholds, but so far those operations have failed to stop the group’s attacks.
The United States announced in early March that it would offer a reward of up to $5 million for any information it might lead to its leader, a Ugandan man in his 40s named Musa Baluku.
Source: Ambito
