Four young children were stabbed inside a kindergarten in Kampala, Uganda, by a man whose motive remains unclear, police said.
One suspect has been arrested.
Two rag dolls, abandoned, lay today in the yard of this kindergarten that doubles as a nursery.
The victims were aged two to three years old, police spokeswoman Rachel Kawala told Agence France-Presse. In a video posted by police on their X-platform account, the spokeswoman clarified that they were three little boys and a little girl.
The arrested man is 34 years old and “we are trying to find out where and if he works,” Kawala added. In its official statement, however, police said the suspect is 39 years old.
“What we know is that he showed up at the school as a parent. We know that he had visited the school a few days ago, asking to enrol his son. Today, he paid the registration for that child, but a few minutes later he started stabbing the children, killing four of them. Ten children escaped and are already with their parents. The bodies of the four were taken to the morgue,” the spokeswoman narrated.
The spokeswoman narrated.
Kawala said the suspect tried to flee but was stopped by a crowd who attempted to lynch him. “The police intervened, rescued and arrested him,” she said.
The angry crowd set tyres on fire and officers had to fire warning shots to disperse the gathering.
Video released by Ugandan media showed parents crying, gathered near the school. “What have these innocent children done?” a woman can be heard shouting.
“Give me my children, now!” a young woman screams in another video, being restrained by police officers preventing her from approaching the building. “We will not be silenced, give us our children,” she continued.
Police chief Abbas Biakagaba went to the scene in person.
Heavy police forces were deployed in the Gaba district on the shores of Lake Victoria.
These kinds of crimes, with attacks on schools by individual perpetrators, are rare in Uganda. In the past, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group seeking to establish a Ten Commandments-based regime (it was driven out of the country 20 years ago), has launched attacks on schools and abducted students to make them either soldiers or sex slaves. In 2023, jihadists from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an offshoot of the Islamic State, attacked a high school, killing 42 people, most of them students sleeping in their dormitory.
