Uganda: DP Wants Govt to Explain How Deadly Kasese School Attack Happened
The Democratic Party (DP) leadership has said the country deserves to know why security agencies failed to detect and prevent the attack on Lhubiriha Secondary School.
The attack left over 40 people killed in cold blood.
According to the reports, 37 of the dead were students and five were civilians including the school guard and residents of the area who were allegedly killed as the rebels fled the scene.
While addressing the media on Tuesday in Kampala, the president of Uganda Young Democrats (UYD) Ismail Kiirya charged that there was criminal negligence by security.
He noted that the security docket receives a lot of money, some of it classified, which is why it is expected to perform better than other sectors.
“So how come that this happened in their absentia, the incident happened 800m away from Karambe police station and 1.5 km from the army barracks. Our biggest question is where were all these security operatives?” he wondered.
“It is said that the people who attacked were more than 20 people and this could not be foreseen by our security? which has the RDC, DISO, PISO among others,” he wondered.
Kiirya said it is clear that the security works as a fire brigade instead of fire preventers.
“We can now see all sorts of army trucks in Kasese stationed doing what now? This could have been there before. We are requesting this time security to give us a concrete report so that we know the exact number of children killed, injured and abducted because we are confused with the various reports coming from different people,” he noted.
He called upon the government to immediately rescue those abducted with immediate effect and also explain to Ugandans why it is failing to protect Ugandans as one of its mandates.
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“We condole with the families of the victims and continue to pray for the abducted to be found and given a safe heaven. We strongly condemn the act and call upon the government to offer solutions to all the insecurities in Uganda today,” he said.
Last Friday, gunmen suspected to be Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels attacked Lhubiriha Secondary School at Mpondwe in Kasese District in western Uganda, leaving 42 people, including 37 students either hacked or burnt to death during a shocking raid.
The unchallenged orgy of killing has raised questions amongst grief- stricken locals and different leaders in the country.
Mpondwe is located in Nyabugando Town Council, Karambi Sub County, in Kasese district. The school is about two kilometres from the shared border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Between 1995 when ADF was formed from a coalition of anti- government rebels, and the mid- 2000s, the sub-region was wracked by bloody ADF attacks which led to the death of scores of civilians.
