At least 41 killed in rebel attack on Ugandan school near Congo border

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Ugandan 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.

Authorities blamed the massacre at Lhubiriha Secondary School in the border town of Mpondwe on the Allied Democratic Forces, a shadowy extremist group with ties to the Islamic State, which has been launching attacks for years from bases in volatile eastern Congo.

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 p.m., 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 Brigadier 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 (1.2 miles) from the Congo border.

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