Ugandan authorities recovered the bodies of 41 people, including 38 students, who were burned, shot, or hacked to death by attackers at a secondary school on Saturday.
According to Al Jazeera, at least six people were abducted by the rebels linked to Islamic State, who fled across the porous border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the grisly raid.
Military personnel found the bodies of the dead when they arrived at the school, defence spokesperson Felix Kulayigye said in a statement.
“Our forces are pursuing the enemy to rescue those abducted and destroy this group,” he said earlier on Twitter. The attackers, from the rebel group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), fled towards Virunga National Park in Congo, police said.
Authorities blamed the massacre at Lhubiriha Secondary School in the border town of Mpondwe on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an armed group with ties to ISIL (ISIS), which has been launching attacks for years from bases in volatile eastern DRC.
It was the deadliest attack in Uganda since twin bombings in Kampala in 2010 killed 76 in an attack claimed by the Somalia-based al-Shabab group.
