At least 25 students were killed in an attack by jihadists overnight from Friday to Saturday against a school where a dormitory was set on fire, in western Uganda, near the border with DR Congo .
“All the dead” are “school students”, aged 16 and over, district government official Joe Walusimbi told AFP.
Police spokesman Fred Enanga said earlier that “eight injured people were also found and are still in critical condition at Bwera Hospital”.
He said the Armed Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist militia that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and based in eastern DR Congo, attacked a high school near Bwera where “a dormitory was set on fire and a looted food store”.
A number of students are still missing, said district commissioner Joe Walusimbi.
The army and the police pursue the attackers who fled in the direction of the national park of Virunga, located on the other side of the border, in DR Congo, where the ADF are.
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Originally mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, the ADF have been rooted since the mid-1990s in eastern DRC, where they are accused of having massacred thousands of civilians.
They pledged allegiance in 2019 to the Islamic State group, which presents them as its branch in Central Africa, and are also accused of jihadist attacks on Ugandan soil.
This is not the first attack on a school in Uganda attributed to the ADF.
In June 1998, 80 students were burned to death in their dormitories in an ADF attack on the Kichwamba Technical Institute near the DR Congo border. Over 100 students were abducted.
Uganda and the DRC launched a joint offensive in 2021 to drive the ADF out of their Congolese strongholds, but these operations have so far failed to end the group’s attacks.
The United States announced in early March that it was offering a reward of up to $5 million for any information that could lead to its leader, a Ugandan in his 40s named Musa Baluku.
17/06/2023 10:50:41 — Kampala (AFP) © 2023 AFP