(Kampala) Ugandan police announced on Monday the arrest of “20 collaborators” suspected of ADF rebels after the massacre blamed on jihadists which left at least 42 dead last weekend in a secondary school, most of them students surprised in their dorms.
“We have arrested 20 suspected collaborators of the ADF”, the Allied Democratic Forces, said Fred Enanga, spokesman for the Ugandan police, during a press conference.
Immediately after the massacre, Ugandan army and police officials had incriminated members of the ADF, an Islamist militia that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State 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, mostly students, were attacked with machetes, shot or burned alive, according to a new report given Monday by the police.
In a statement, police said the headteacher and principal of Lhubiriha secondary school in Mpondwe, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), were among those arrested.
Six injured people are still in hospital, said Fred Enanga, who described the attack as “barbaric”, “inhumane” and a “crime against humanity”. The police spokesman also said the exact number of those abducted was not yet known.
PHOTO REUTERS
Security forces vehicles in front of Lhubiriha secondary school in Mpondwe
This announcement comes as families are 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, a guardian of one of the missing students, told AFP after harrowing visits to morgues and hospitals. of the region.
“It is a painful situation that no parent would want to go through, but we remain hopeful that they are alive wherever they are,” he added.
Officials say the 42 dead include 37 students and a security guard.
PHOTO HAJARAH NALWADDA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The body of a victim lies on a table in the morgue of a hospital in Bwera.
“Security under control”
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 district commissioner of Kesese, 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 to the point of being unrecognizable”, he declared to AFP, while affirming, 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 has been active and has been accused of killing thousands of civilians since the 1990s.
Originally the mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, established in the DRC since the 1990s, they 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 secondary school in Mpondwe is the deadliest in Uganda since the twin bombings in Kampala in 2010 that killed 76 people in a raid claimed by the Islamist group Shebab, based in Somalia.
According to the latest report by UN experts, consulted by AFP and scheduled to be released this week, the ADF rebels have since at least 2019 received financial support from the Islamic State group and were seeking to expand their area of operations. .