By Frank Kamuntu
President Yoweri Museveni said Saturday an airstrike by the east African country’s military had killed members of an Islamic State (IS)-allied rebel group including a key person responsible for bomb attacks in Uganda’s capital.
The strike was carried out in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo on September 16 and intelligence gathered after the strike had confirmed members of group, Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), had been killed, he said.
“A lot of terrorists were killed, including the notorious Meddie Nkalubo, who has been the author of the bombs in Kampala,” Museveni said in a statement referring to Uganda’s capital.
He did not say how many were killed.
In December 2021 Uganda launched an operation in eastern Congo against ADF but the group still carries out attacks both against civilians and military targets in Congo and Uganda.
In two of the group’s most devastating attacks in Uganda, suicide bombings in 2021 outside a major police station in Kampala and near the parliament building left seven people dead.
In June this year, 42 people, mostly students, were massacred at a school in Kasese in western Uganda — another attack Uganda blamed on ADF.
The rebel group is widely believed to seek to establish an Islamic rule in the east African country.
It emerged in the 1990s in Uganda’s west but was eventually routed by the military and remnants fled into the jungles of eastern Congo where they have been operating from since then.
ADF almost never send out statements and have not commented on the Ugandan raid.
