Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels killed five people in a rare daylight attack in Uganda's remote north, the army said today.
The east African country's military said it was pursuing the fighters yesterday when they opened fire on a pick-up truck carrying civilians in Kitgum district, near the border with south Sudan.
"They stopped the pickup and burned it," said army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Shaban Bantariza. "They killed five people."
The driver and three passengers were shot dead. A fourth passenger was hacked to death with an axe.
Others suffered bullet wounds as the overloaded vehicle was attacked as it drove from Kitgum town to Orom, about 475 km (295 miles) northeast of the capital Kampala.
LRA ambushes on the north's rough dirt roads rarely happen in daylight.
For 19 years the cult-like LRA has terrorised isolated communities on both sides of the border with Sudan, uprooting 1.6 million people in northern Uganda alone.
The group has no clear political motives but is notorious for massacring civilians and abducting thousands of children who are forced to become fighters, porters and sex slaves.
Last week LRA fighters burned scores of huts in the northeastern Teso region, which had been relatively free of rebel activities for nearly two years.
The fresh attacks came shortly after at least 300 heavily armed LRA rebels left their hideouts in southern Sudan last month for remote northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The United Nations said today it had airlifted several hundred Congolese government soldiers to the border area to deal with the group after it refused to disarm.