In a statement on Saturday, police authorities said that the Allied Democratic Forces carried out the attack late Friday night on a school in the border town of Mpondwe.
ADVERTISEMENTUgandan authorities recovered the bodies of 41 people, including 38 students, who were burned, shot or hacked to death after suspected rebels attacked a secondary school near the border with Congo, the local mayor said Saturday.
At least six people were abducted by the rebels, who fled across the porous border into Congo after the raid on Friday night, according to the Ugandan military.
The victims included the students, one guard and two members of the local community who were killed outside the school, Mpondwe-Lhubiriha Mayor Selevest Mapoze told The Associated Press.
Mapoze said that some of the students suffered fatal burns when the rebels set fire to a dormitory and others were shot or hacked with machetes.
The raid, which happened around 11:30 pm, involved about five attackers, the Ugandan military said. Soldiers from a nearby brigade who responded to the attack found the school on fire, “with dead bodies of students lying in the compound," military spokesman Brig. Felix Kulayigye said in a statement.
That statement cited 47 bodies, with eight other people wounded and being treated at a local hospital. Ugandan troops are “pursuing the perpetrators to rescue the abducted students” who were forced to carry looted food toward Congo's Virunga National Park, it said.
The school, co-ed and privately owned, is located in the Ugandan district of Kasese, about 2 kilometres from the Congo border.
A government official and a military spokesman said others were abducted and a dormitory was set on fire.
Police said Ugandan troops tracked the attackers into Congo’s Virunga National Park. The military confirmed in a statement that Ugandan troops inside Congo "are pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted.”
Joe Walusimbi, an official representing Uganda’s president in Kasese, told The Associated Press over the phone that authorities were trying to verify the number of victims and those abducted.
“Some bodies were burnt beyond recognition,” he said.
Winnie Kiiza, an influential political leader and a former lawmaker from the region, condemned the “cowardly attack” on Twitter. She said “Attacks on schools are unacceptable and are a grave violation of children’s rights," adding that schools should always be "a safe place for every student.”
The Allied Democratic Forces, or ADF, has been accused of launching many attacks in recent years, targeting civilians, in remote parts of eastern Congo.
The ADF has long opposed the rule of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a US security ally who has been in power since 1986.
The group was established in the early 1990s by some Ugandan Muslims, who said they had been sidelined by Museveni’s policies. At the time, the rebels staged deadly attacks in Ugandan villages as well as in the capital, including a 1998 attack in which 80 students were massacred in a town not far from the scene of the latest attack.
A Ugandan military assault later forced the ADF into eastern Congo, where many rebel groups are able to operate because the central government has limited control there.
The group has since established ties with the Islamic State group.
In March, at least 19 people were killed in Congo by suspected ADF extremists.
ADVERTISEMENTUgandan authorities for years have vowed to track down ADF militants even outside Ugandan territory. In 2021, Uganda launched joint air and artillery strikes in Congo against the group.