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Suspected rebels attacked a school in a remote area of Uganda near the Congo border, killing at least 41 people in a nighttime raid before fleeing across the porous frontier, authorities said.
Thirty-eight students in their dormitories were among the victims.
Some students were burned beyond recognition, and others were shot or hacked to death after militants armed with guns and machetes attacked the school in the frontier district of Kasese, a local mayor told The Associated Press.
In addition to the 38 students, one guard and two residents of the local community in Mpondwe-Lhubiriha town were killed in the attack, said Mayor Selevest Mapoze.
A Ugandan military statement said the rebels abducted six students, taken as porters of food looted from the school’s store.
The school, co-ed and privately owned, is located just over a mile from the Congo border.
Authorities are blaming the massacre at Lhubiriha Secondary School on the Allied Democratic Forces, or ADF, a shadowy extremist group that has been launching attacks for years from bases in volatile eastern Congo. Villagers in the Congolese provinces of Ituri and North Kivu have been the victims of the group’s alleged attacks in recent years.
But attacks on the Ugandan side of the border are rare, thanks in part to the presence of an alpine brigade of Ugandan troops in the region.
The attack has sent shockwaves in this normally peaceful East African country whose long-time leader cites security as a strength of his government.
