Heartbroken relatives gathered this Sunday in a Ugandan morgue seeking news of their loved ones, after the attack by a rebel group that left 41 dead in a school, the vast majority of them students.
At least 41 people were massacred on Friday night in a secondary school in the west of the country, located very close to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the jihadist-affiliated militia to which the authorities blamed the assault has its stronghold. .
The victims were hacked to death, shot or burned at the Lhubiriha school in the town of Mpondwe.
The army and police accused the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group linked to the Islamic State jihadist group. The militia took six kidnapped people to the DRC.
Many of the victims burned to death when the attackers set fire to a collective dormitory, which complicates the identification and counting of the missing.
At the Bwera morgue, near where the attack took place, families wept as the bodies of their relatives were placed on coffins and carried away for burial.
Others continue without news of their loved ones. Many of the victims who were burned to death were taken to the city of Fort Portal, where they will undergo DNA tests to be identified.
In the assault, 17 male students perished, burned in their dormitory. Twenty schoolgirls were hacked to death, according to Uganda’s First Lady and Minister of Education, Janet Museveni. A security guard was also killed, according to authorities.
Friday’s was the bloodiest attack in Uganda since 2010, when 76 people were killed in a double attack in Kampala carried out by the Somali jihadist group Al Shabab.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres denounced the “appalling” act, and both the United States and the African Union also condemned the massacre and sent their condolences.
At the same time, questions have been raised about how the militants avoided detection, in a border area subject to a heavy military presence.
General Dick Olum told Afp that the intelligence collected points to the presence of ADF militiamen in the area at least two days before the attack, and specified that an investigation will be needed to clarify the errors.
The ADF militia began as an insurgent group in largely 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.
Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo launched a joint offensive in 2021 to drive the ADF out of their Congolese strongholds, but those operations failed to stem the group’s attacks.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project