KAMPALA, June 17 (Reuters) – Islamic State-linked militants killed 37 people and kidnapped six others in an attack on a school in western Uganda near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the army said on Saturday. .
“Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue the abductees and destroy this group,” Defense spokesman Felix Kulayigye said on Twitter.
The attackers, from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group, fled into Congo’s Virunga National Park, according to police. The force maintained that eight people were in hospital with critical injuries following the attack at Lhubirira Secondary School in Mpondwe.
Private television NTV Uganda said on Twitter that the death toll stood at 41, while state newspaper New Vision put it at 42. New Vision said 39 of those killed were students, with some killed when the attackers blew up a bomb in his flight.
Neither the police nor the army said how many of the dead were schoolchildren. The attackers, who numbered about five, burned a dormitory and looted food, according to both forces.
Major General Dick Olum, Army commander for Western Uganda, stated that the attackers had remained in the town for two days before the attack, marking their target. He added that an unidentified youth had gone to the school to plan the actions.
“This is how the attackers arrived and closed the boys’ door. The boys tried to fight back but were overwhelmed. The attackers had set mattresses on fire,” Olum told reporters from Mpondwe, according to a video posted on Twitter by the Daily Monitor newspaper. .
“In the girls’ bedroom, they found the door open, hence they killed and cut them up.”
ADF rebels launched their insurgency against President Yoweri Museveni in the 1990s from an initial base in the Rwenzori Mountains.
The group was largely defeated by the Ugandan army, but the remnants fled across the border into the vast jungles of eastern Congo, from where they have maintained their insurgency, carrying out attacks on civilian and military targets in both countries.
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema, additional reporting by Jose Joseph in Bengaluru and George Obulutsa in Nairobi and Fiston Mahamba in Goma. Editing in Spanish by Javier Leira)
Source: Ambito
