It was mid morning in Soroti, Uganda when the incident happened. To everybody’s astonishment, a man is thought to have set his children on fire. He wanted to die with the children, but when the fire became hot he fled outside leaving the children for dead.
The incident occurred after the man allegedly fought with his wife over her two day absence from home. When she had returned she had reportedly been beaten her and she had fled to the police.
The couple had reportedly agreed for the women to be allowed to have an extramarital affair because her partner was impotent. But it pained the man when his women was away; he imagined she was probably having sex with another man.
On this occasion, when the women returned to her home, a rented apartment with a single room located in the Usuk cell, Kichinjaji suburbs of Soroti municipality, the man reportedly asked his wife to explain where she had been and then slapped her many times in a fight.
The women fled to the nearby Kichinjaji police post for refuge. It was at this point the man is thought to have dragged the two kids to their room and set them on fire.
A neighbor says she heard them yelling in the fire and called for help but there was no way of breaking the metallic door down to rescue them. One died during the fire, the other was still breathing but died when she reached Soroti referral hospital the same day. One of the children was three years old, the other’s age is unknown.
What a horrible death. The man was checked but found normal, not insane as some people had believed.
The incident happened just a stone’s throw away from the police post. They later intervened and arrested the man. They whisked him to the police station for interrogation.
The wife was left crying mourning for the burnt children in pain.
She said: “He was a handsome man but his penis (manhood) is non functional sexually. He does not erect when time come. He does not have sex with me. But we stay together as husband and wife with two children.
“Ironically these children were not his. They belonged to another man whom I earlier divorced. They were my future. How will I remain without any children as if I did not produce in this world?”
It is a natural phenomenon that the man becomes impotent but nobody thought of curing his impotence, an onlooker said.
It is unfortunate that he has killed children who were harmless, neither did they cause his impotence, another added.
