The bereaved relatives of Suzan Atto, a victim of gender violence, accused the Gulu resident state attorney Patrick Omia of attempting to defeat justice.

The relatives claimed that they learnt the case was being reduced from murder to manslaughter, and did not know how that had been arrived upon.

The couple’s nine-year-old daughter said her father came home from a beer party, drunk some beer from the pot and then told them to witness how he was to kill their mother.

“He slapped mom and kicked her in the chest. It got to a time when she got numb and couldn’t get up. if you touched her on the arm, she could say you were holding her neck.”, said their nine-year-old daughter.

The girl said they saw their father hit their mother’s head on the bed several times until she asked him to take her to the hospital. Then the dad apparently called his breather who is a teacher who found him still drunk.

A postmortem report by the principle medical officer at Gulu regional referral hospital Dr. Onen Ogwedo indicated that the deceased suffered severe blunt force neck trauma. Atto’s father, George Okot and her brother Alex Obau, didn’t agree with the resident state attorney and had appealed to the directorate of state prosecutions in Kampala to review the matter.

“How can it be manslaughter when somebody is already dead? And the bad thing is, I think these people had already planned to kill my daughter,” said Atto’s father.

According to the Gulu women economic development and globalization report of 2016, the rate of gender-based violence in northern Uganda was alarming.

“For many women in northern Uganda, violence and injustice has become a regular part of their life and to some extent normalized impunity.” said one of the Gulu women rights activist.

Aswaal region police spokesperson Jimmy Patrick Okema urged the stakeholders to push for justice. Saying that “it should have been directly murder and that could come in his defense but the court has not yet given him an opportunity to.”

The world vision program manager in Gulu, Harriet Oloyo had some words of caution. She stated that people should not simply cohabit because it creates high insecurity for the women that are in cohabitation and is also a high risk to the children and that is the reason why there is a high level of broken relationships.