Family murder suspect committed to High Court

Feb 07, 2014

Nakawa magistrate’s court has commits a woman accused of burning her family members to death to Nakawa High Court.

By Michael Odeng

Nakawa magistrate’s court has committed a woman accused of burning her family members to death to Nakawa High Court to expedite her trial.

Edith Kayaga is facing charges of murder following an incident that happened last year on June 2.

She is being accused of locking up her husband together with two of their children in the house and setting it ablaze.

Two other occupants of the house managed to escape.

Court presided over by grade one magistrate, Gladys Kamasanyu, committed the suspect on grounds that investigations were complete.

Now that this stage is through, a criminal session at the High Court will follow, and Justice Wilson Musene is scheduled to preside over the case.

The proceedings will kick off on March 10 – a little over a month away.

Prosecutors say Kayaga killed her family in Najjera, Kiira town council located in Wakiso district.

Following the incident, two children who escaped the inferno told Police they had managed to make out of the house through the garage door because they were in the garage at the time.

At the police station, they told of how their mother counted “a lot of money” and stuffed it into a bag, moments before the house caught on fire.

One of them added that she then “picked a jerrycan of petrol we use for the generator from behind the fridge”.

He said that when the house started to catch fire, their mother hurled him into the house through a window and locked the door.

And that when his father came to open the door, he found it locked and started screaming for help as the fire consumed him.

On the night of the fire, one of the surviving children said their mother asked them to relocate to the main section of the house out of the garage. But they refused.

They were lucky the garage door was easy to open, and that was their escape route.

The deceased man, Ismail Kawooya, was a father of seven children and conducted business at Nakawa market.

His nephew, who stayed in the boy’s quarters, said that when the main house caught fire, Kawooya’s wife (the suspect) knocked at his door and told him to go and rescue those trapped in the house.

She then boarded a boda boda (motorcycle) and sped off, reportedly to Mulago hospital. Police later picked her from the health facility and took her to Butabika psychiatric hospital for check-up.

The two children who died in the fire were six-year-old Shakira Nakubulwa and Saidah Namle, a Senior Four student.

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