NAIROBI, Kenya — The militants reached the private boarding school compound just before midnight, as students were going to bed, on a partly cloudy night in a small town in the lush western fields of Uganda.
First, they shot the school’s guard in the head before they went to the students’ dormitories. When they could not enter the boys’ locked residential halls, they hurled firebombs inside, setting mattresses ablaze and igniting a fire that soon engulfed the building, according to witnesses, government officials and security officers. Petrified, the girls unlocked their dormitory’s doors and tried to flee, only for the assailants to catch up with them and hack them to death with machetes.