When military forces arrived on the scene at Lhubiriha Secondary School, “the school was found burning with dead bodies of students lying in the compound,” Kulayigye, a brigadier general, said in a statement.
The local mayor, Selevest Mapoze, gave an even more grim account to the Associated Press, saying 41 people, including 38 students, had been killed. Some of the victims suffered fatal burns in a dormitory that the attackers set on fire, Mapoze said, and others were shot or hacked to death with machetes.
According to Kulayigye, the suspected attackers were rebels from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an extremist group that has ties to the Islamic State and operates in Uganda and across the border in Congo. He said Ugandan forces were “pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted and destroy” the group.
The U.S. mission in Uganda said Saturday that it was “deeply saddened to learn of the heinous attack” and offered condolences to the victims’ families. In a statement, the United Nations Children’s Fund condemned the violence it said took place on “the same day gazetted to commemorate the Day of the African Child.”
On Twitter, Bobi Wine, a rapper-turned-opposition leader, said he hopes “investigations can begin in earnest so that the perpetrators of this crime face justice.”
The attackers spent two nights in the area in western Uganda before the assault, a senior military official said, Uganda’s Daily Monitor newspaper reported. After the raid, the rebels forced the abducted students to help them carry the looted food toward Congo’s Virunga National Park, according to Kulayigye. Law enforcement joined the military “in hot pursuit” as the rebels fled in the direction of the park, police said.
The attack was the latest atrocity blamed on rebel groups operating out of Congo’s eastern region, with violence sometimes spilling over the border with Uganda.
On Monday, 114 asylum seekers — 70 of whom were children — crossed the border from Congo to Uganda, fleeing what Uganda’s Red Cross Society said were suspected ADF attacks in Congo’s Kasindi, about six miles from Mpondwe. They later returned home after Congolese forces assured them it was safe to do so.
The ADF, which was founded by Ugandan exiles in Congo in 1995 with the aim of toppling Uganda’s government, has a history of attacks throughout the region, including at least one targeting an educational institution. In 1998, the group raided a college in western Uganda, killing 80 students and abducting 100 others, according to the Daily Monitor.
Since then, the United States, United Nations and Ugandan and Congolese governments have all accused the group of waging violent attacks, including against civilians, military forces and U.N. peacekeepers inside Congo.
The group established ties with the Islamic State group in 2018, according to the U.S. State Department, which designated the ADF as a foreign terrorist organization in 2021 and has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information on its leader, Seka Musa Baluku.
In 2021, the Ugandan government identified it as the culprit behind a series of suicide bombings that targeted the capital city, Kampala. In March, the ADF killed at least 36 people in a raid on a village in Congo’s North Kivu province, the AP reported.
Ables reported from Seoul, Bisset from London and Gregg from Washington.