Four Children Stabbed to Death at Kampala School, Suspect in Custody

A 34-year-old man walked into a Kampala nursery school on Thursday posing as a parent, locked the gate from the inside, and methodically stabbed four children to death before anyone could stop him. The attack at the Ggaba Early Childhood Development Program school in Makindye Division has left Uganda confronting sharp questions about how a single individual could penetrate a school, secure the perimeter, and kill four children before staff could raise an effective defense.

The suspect, identified by police as Christopher Okello, first entered the school's administrative offices and briefly spoke with the administrator on duty. He then stepped outside, locked the front gate, and began attacking children one after another with a sharp object described by witnesses as either a machete or a knife. By the time teachers raised the alarm and Okello attempted to flee, one girl and three boys were dead. It was a security guard from the neighbouring Ggaba Community Church, not school staff or police, who physically stopped him.

That detail has not gone unnoticed. The school had no mechanism to prevent a stranger from locking its own gate and isolating its children from outside help. Uganda Police Force spokesperson Kituuma Rusoke confirmed the four fatalities, and Kampala Metropolitan Police spokesperson SP Racheal Kawala posted the official statement on X confirming Okello's arrest. "The suspect has been apprehended, and the motive behind the killings is still under investigation," Kawala wrote. "Further details will be provided in due course." Preliminary police findings suggest Okello had previously sought to enrol his own child at the same facility, though that has not been officially confirmed as a motive.

Inspector General of Police Abbas Byakagaba traveled personally to Ggaba to oversee the investigation, a sign of the gravity with which authorities are treating the case. Byakagaba urged restraint after an angry crowd gathered near the school and attempted to carry out mob justice against Okello before police fired shots into the air to disperse them. NTV Uganda footage showed parents weeping at the school gates. "We understand the pain and anger within the community, but we call upon the public to remain calm as we thoroughly investigate this incident," Byakagaba said.

Thursday's attack lands differently than Uganda's previous mass school violence. The June 2023 massacre at Lhubiriha Secondary School in Mpondwe, where Allied Democratic Forces rebels killed 42 people including 38 students in Kasese District, was an organized armed assault linked to the Islamic State. The 2010 twin bombings in Kampala, carried out by the Somalia-based al-Shabaab group, killed 76 people in a coordinated terrorist operation. What happened at the Ggaba Early Childhood Development Program appears to be the act of one man with a blade and access to a school that had no gate-locking protocol, no trained security on-site, and no system to rapidly alert parents or emergency services once the attack began.

Uganda has no comprehensive framework governing physical security standards at early childhood centres. Community leaders in Ggaba are now pressing for answers on what protocols, if any, were in place at the school, how quickly police were actually notified, and what parents were told in the immediate aftermath of the killings. Those questions will shape whatever comes next, because the machinery that stopped Christopher Okello on Thursday was a church security guard acting on instinct, not a system designed to protect children.