Rebels hacked to death six people in northern Uganda overnight as the army detained two opposition politicians for alleged collaboration with the insurgents, officials said on Thursday.
The six adults and children were beaten and stabbed with machetes and hoes when the rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) assaulted three villages in Adjuman district.
The rebels injured at least 16 other villagers and set fire to scores of homes, according to officials in neighbouring Gulu district.
”They attacked the villages of Siriri, Aboki and Pali around midnight on Wednesday and killed six people, injuring 16 others,” Lieutenant Kincoco Tabaro, the army spokesperson in Gulu, said from Kampala by telephone.
He said the rebels torched 75 grass-thatched houses in the villages before the army repelled them, killing one fighter.
”Our forces are still pursuing them,” Tabaro said.
The resident district commissioner, Patrick Buriiku, who had just visited the scene of the attacks, said from Adjuman that he had seen bodies of victims whose skulls had been shattered with garden tools.
”They were killed in a most horrible manner,” he said. ”I came across bodies of both children and adults with their heads shattered when the rebels hit them with hoes.”
Buriiku said it appeared the rebels had attacked or tried to attack everyone they found at home in the three villages, which had until Wednesday not generally been targeted by the LRA.
The relative lack of rebel activity in the area is believed to be the main reason that many villagers were in their homes at the time of the attacks, according to Tabaro.
In many parts of northern Uganda, where LRA activity is high, more than 90% of villagers have left their homes fearing attacks, and now live in squalid camps for the war-displaced that dot the region.
More than 1,6-million people have been forced from their homes during the LRA’s 18-year war against the government, which has been marked by brutal attacks against northern Uganda’s civilian population.
The LRA has since 1998 been fighting to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni’s secular government and replace it with one ostensibly guided by the Biblical Ten Commandments.
Meanwhile, the Gulu branch of the opposition Democratic Party said two of its senior officials have been detained by the army in Gulu.
”Our general secretary, David Penytoo, and an executive member, Stephen Olanya, were arrested yesterday [Wednesday] and are being detained in Gulu military barracks,” said Alex Otim, the head of the party’s youth wing in Gulu.
Tabaro confirmed the detention of the pair but refused to offer details. An army official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Penytoo and Olanya are suspected of having LRA ties.
”They were arrested for rebel collaboration activities and investigations are still ongoing,” the official said, without elaborating.
Penytoo had recently been released from nearly three years in prison, where he had been held for unspecified reasons without being charged.
Recent and repeated efforts to clinch a ceasefire and launch formal peace talks have failed to get off the ground amid growing mistrust between the Kampala government and the insurgents. — Sapa-AFP