Ugandan police on Monday (June 19th) announced the arrest of “20 suspected collaborators” of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels after the massacre that left at least 42 people dead last weekend at a high school, most of them students surprised in their dormitories. Army and police officials then incriminated members of the ADF, an Islamist militia that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group.
At least 42 people, the youngest of whom was 12 and the oldest 95, were killed overnight from Friday to Saturday in western Uganda. The victims were attacked with machetes, shot or burned alive, according to a new report given Monday by the police. Officials say the 42 dead include 37 students and a security guard.
In a statement, police said the head of the school and the principal of Lhubiriha high school in Mpondwe, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), were among those arrested. Six injured people remain in hospital, police spokesman Fred Enanga said, calling the attack “barbaric”, “inhumane” and a “crime against humanity”. He also said the exact number of abductees was not yet known.
This announcement comes as families were still waiting on Monday for the results of DNA tests to identify victims of the massacre. Seventeen were indeed burned beyond recognition when the attackers set fire to a dormitory, complicating the identification and count of missing persons.
“We are not sure that 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, guardian of one of the missing students, told AFP after harrowing visits to morgues and hospitals in the region: “It’s a painful situation that no parent would want to go through, but we remain hopeful that they are alive wherever they are. »
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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, had earlier said most of the identified victims were buried on Sunday and 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 beyond recognition,” he told AFP, while claiming, contrary to some social media posts that schools in the area are still open. “The security situation is under control,” he said.
The school is less than two kilometers from the border with the DRC, where the ADF is active and is accused of having killed thousands of civilians since the 1990s. Originally the mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, established in the DRC since the 1990s, they have 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 twin bombings in Kampala in 2010, which killed 76 people in a raid claimed by the Islamist group Al-Shabaab, based in Somalia. According to the latest report by UN experts, consulted by AFP and scheduled for release this week, the ADF has received financial support from the IS group since at least 2019 and was seeking to expand its area of operations.