Around five gunmen entered a private boarding school in the town of Mpondwe on Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo late Friday, when students were sleeping in their dormitories, said Gen. Dick Olum, the commander of the military in western Uganda.
The assailants, believed to be fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces terror group, locked dozens of students, most of them boys, in one dormitory before setting it on fire, Olum said. They then combed through other buildings of the Lhubiriha Secondary School for hours, hacking students to death, before taking at least six others captive so they could help carry looted food across the Congolese border.
Olum said 62 students, most of them between the ages of 14 and 17, were at the boarding school at the time. Eight students injured during the attack were taken to a local hospital, while three students were unharmed, he said.
The school sits less than two miles from Uganda’s border with Congo, where the ADF, an insurgent group founded in Uganda but now based in the jungles of eastern Congo, has been waging a vicious war.
“We are now conducting a search-and-rescue mission for the students who were abducted,” Olum told reporters in Uganda’s Kasese district. “We have called in reinforcements from the air force. We are in hot pursuit.”
It is the militants’ second attack in Uganda in six months and the deadliest by any terror group in the country since militants from the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab group planted bombs among crowds watching the 2010 World Cup final in the capital, Kampala, killing 76 people.
Uganda’s first lady, Janet Museveni, who is also the country’s education minister, said in an address from State House that the school had been built by a Canadian non-profit that is active in Uganda and Congo.
A British Columbia-based volunteer group called Partnerships for Opportunity Development Association, or PODA, says on its website that it built the Lhubiriha Secondary School starting in 2010, a few years after the group’s founders first visited the Kasese region.
Students at the school mostly come from local villages and benefit from fees that are lower than those at government schools, while free education is provided for students that have been orphaned by Uganda’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, the website says. An email to PODA sent through its website didn’t immediately receive a response.
Friday’s attack on the Lhubiriha Secondary School brought back painful memories of a 1998 assault by the ADF, in which the militants killed more than 80 students at a college in western Uganda, about 40 miles from Mpondwe.
Over the past four years, ADF rebels have blown up churches and burned down villages across eastern Congo, killing more than 4,000 civilians, according to Texas-based nonprofit group Bridgeway Foundation.
The ADF was founded in the early 1990s in Uganda as an armed Islamist group to fight the regime of President Yoweri Museveni. In the late 1990s, the Ugandan military forced it to retreat into the jungles of eastern Congo, where the group usually operates.
Islamic State formally recognized the ADF as one of its affiliates in July 2019. In recent years, funding and technical assistance from Islamic State’s central leadership have emboldened the group to launch high-profile attacks in Uganda and neighboring Rwanda.
In March, the U.S. government added the ADF’s leader, Musa Baluku, to its Rewards for Justice program, offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture and underscoring the rising threat from the Islamic State franchise.
In November 2021, the ADF orchestrated deadly twin bombings in Kampala that killed six people, prompting Uganda to send troops into Congo to battle the insurgents. Museveni told parliament last week that the military has so far killed more than 500 ADF fighters in Congo.
According to Museveni, more troops from the East African Community Regional Force are needed to restore order in eastern Congo. “More troops and diplomatic efforts from the regional states will help address the security challenges posed by these instabilities,” he said.
—Gabriele Steinhauser in Johannesburg contributed to this article.
Write to Nicholas Bariyo at [email protected]
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