KAMPALA, Uganda—Terrorists linked to the ISIS terrorist group killed 37 people and abducted six others in an attack on a school in western Uganda near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the military said on June 17.
Military personnel found the bodies of the dead when they arrived at the school, defense spokesperson Felix Kulayigye said in a statement.
“Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted and destroy this group,” he said earlier on Twitter. The attackers, from the terrorist group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), fled toward the Virunga National Park in Congo, police said.
Police said eight other people were hospitalized with critical injuries from the attack at the Lhubirira Secondary School in Mpondwe.
Privately owned NTV Uganda television said on Twitter that the death toll stood at 41, while state-run New Vision newspaper said it was 42. New Vision said 39 of the dead were students, and that some of those killed died when the attackers set off a bomb as they fled.
Neither police nor the military stated how many of the dead were schoolchildren.
The assailants, numbering about five, burned down a dormitory and looted food, police and the military said.
The attackers had stayed in the town two days before the attack, to mark their target, Maj. Gen. Dick Olum, the army’s commander for western Uganda and in charge of a military deployment in Congo.
He said an unidentified youth had gone to the school to check its layout prior to the attack.
“That is how the attackers came and locked the boys’ door. The boys really tried to fight back, but they were overpowered. The attackers had lit mattresses,” Olum told reporters from Mpondwe, according to a video posted on Twitter by the Daily Monitor newspaper.
“In the girls’ dorm, they found their door open, hence killing them and cutting them.”
The ADF terrorists launched their insurgency against President Yoweri Museveni in the 1990s from an initial base in the Rwenzori Mountains.
While the group was largely defeated by the Ugandan military, remnants fled across the border into the vast jungles of eastern Congo, where they have since maintained their insurgency—perpetrating attacks on civilian and military targets in Congo and also Uganda.
In April, the ADF attacked a village in eastern Congo, killing at least 20 people.
