Uganda: the difficult work of identifying the victims of the jihadist attack on a high school

June 19, 2023

Families in western Uganda are still awaiting the results of DNA tests Monday to identify victims of the massacre perpetrated by jihadists in a high school, which left at least 41 dead, most of them students surprised in their dormitories.

The victims were attacked with machetes, shot or burned alive on Friday evening at the Lhubiriha school in Mpondwe, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Fifteen other members of the community, including five girls, are still missing.

Ugandan army and police officials have blamed members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist militia that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

Seventeen victims were burned beyond recognition when assailants set fire to a dormitory, complicating the identification of victims and the tally of missing persons.

“We are not sure if our children are among those who have been kidnapped or burned. We are saddened, maybe the government will give us an answer soon and we are praying,” Joseph Masika, a guardian, told AFP. of one of the missing students after harrowing visits to area morgues and hospitals.

“It is a painful situation that no parent would want to go through, but we remain hopeful that they are alive wherever they are,” he added.

Officials said the 41 victims included 37 students and four others, including a security guard.

President Yoweri Museveni on Sunday called the massacre a “desperate, cowardly” act and promised to eliminate those responsible for the bloody assault, the worst of its kind in the country in years.

Joe Walusimbi, the Kesese district commissioner, where the school is located, said most of the identified victims were buried on Sunday, but burials were continuing on Monday.

“We have almost completed the burial of the dead already identified and we are awaiting the DNA tests of these students who have been burned to the point of being unrecognizable”, he declared to AFP, while affirming, contrary to certain publications on social networks, that the schools in the area are still open: “the security situation is under control”.

The school is less than two kilometers from the border with the DRC, where the ADF has been active and has been accused of killing thousands of civilians since the 1990s.

Originally mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, established in the DRC since the 1990s, they pledged allegiance in 2019 to IS, which claims some of their actions and presents them as its “Central African province” (Iscap in English).

Friday’s attack on Lhubiriha High School in Mpondwe is the deadliest in Uganda since the double bombing in Kampala in 2010 that killed 76 people in a raid claimed by the Islamist group Shebab, based in Somalia.

According to the latest report by UN experts, consulted by AFP and scheduled to be released this week, the ADF rebels have since at least 2019 received financial support from the Islamic State group and have been seeking to expand their area of ??operations. .