The Ugandan army killed five Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and captured 14 others in an ambush on Friday, an army representative said here.
Major Shaban Bantariza said by telephone that the ambush took place at Acet, northeast of Gulu town at around 10:00 am (0700 GMT) and that six sub-machine guns, rounds of ammunition and a satellite charger were taken.
”We paraded them for the press at Gulu barracks today,” Lieutenant Paddy Ankunda said by telephone from Gulu.
The captured rebels told a journalist who interviewed them that they had been abducted this year by the LRA and forced to work as porters for the rebels. ”Some had swollen legs with fresh bullet wounds,” the journalist said, adding that two were girls and some were as young as 10 years old.
The oldest was about 18 years old, the journalist said. The LRA has been battling government forces in northern Uganda since 1988 in an effort to oust President Yoweri Museveni’s secular regime and replace it with one based on the biblical Ten
Commandments.
The LRA’s main method of recruitment is through abduction of young people, with boys forced to join its rebel force as soldiers and girls becoming concubines to rebel commanders.
After a lull of almost two years, the rebel group intensified its violent campaign to oust Museveni last May. The escalation of the conflict followed the signing in March of a protocol between Uganda and Sudan under which Kampala was allowed to send troops into government-controlled areas of southern Sudan
to oust the LRA from rear bases there. – Sapa-AFP