Eleven civilians and two soldiers were killed when suspected rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) ambushed a convoy of vehicles in northwestern Uganda, the army said on Friday.
”Thirteen people, including two soldiers, were killed at Pagirinyia village in Adjumani district when rebels fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a bus,” army spokesperson Lieutenant Paddy Ankunda in the north.
Six soldiers and three civilians were wounded in the attack late on Thursday, he said from the northern town of Lira.
The two dead soldiers were travelling in a military vehicle escorting the convoy of about a dozen vehicles and died in a fire-fight with the rebels following the attack on the bus. A car was also torched during the attack, Ankunda said.
The convoy was heading to Adjumani town from Gulu, the main town in northern Uganda.
The LRA, at war with the Ugandan government for nearly two decades, is notorious for committing atrocities against civilians, including forcing children to serve as soldiers or sex workers.
The United Nations Security Council on Wednesday condemned the violence in northern Uganda, with one official calling the conflict one of the least-reported stories in the world.
After a briefing from the UN’s head of emergency relief, Jan Egeland, the council said those crimes should not go unpunished and called on the LRA to ”cease immediately all acts of violence against civilians”.
The council also urged the Ugandan government to enhance the protection of displaced persons and called on humanitarian workers to be given unimpeded access to all parties in need. — Sapa-AFP