I trusted my daughter’s killer so much, says mother of raped Aweil child
The mother of a five-year-old girl who was rapped to death is still battling grief and regret for trusting a stranger with the life of her daughter.
On Monday, May 30, a High Court sitting in Aweil, Northern Bahr el Ghazal State, delivered a landmark ruling by the sentencing of a key perpetrator in a chilling rape-murder case of the late Abuk Lual Lual, to hang.
Justice Abraham Majur handed Saber Abusom Abdalla, a 42-year-old Sudanese national maximum sentence after he was found guilty of raping and later killing a 5-year-old girl.
The presiding judge said Saber, a businessman alongside co-accused, Omar Mahmoud, who was handed five years in jail, had violated Section 140/A of the penal code.
“The first convict, Saber Abdalla, is hereby sentenced to death by hanging. The second sentence is for Omar Mahmoud to 5 years’ imprisonment for violating section 140/A of the South Sudan penal code act 2008,” announced Judge Abraham Majur of Aweil High Court.
But a sombre mood engulfed the courtroom when she recounted how she had put a lot of trust in the very people she once trusted with her life as a daughter.
“What Saber did to my family is something horrible. The reason that let me stay with Saber together was that I didn’t have anywhere to stay, so my husband asked Saber to allow us to stay because he was the one that was renting the house. That is the reason why we came and stayed in one compound,” she explained.
She described the circumstances under which her daughter died as the worst nightmare a mother could experience in Aweil County.
The mother said that she had seen signs that Saber could have been a sex pest but she took no action.
“Many people had been warning me against staying with this person, but I had no choice. A young girl who was related to me came and told me that Saber called her inside and said, “I want to date you”.
“That girl didn’t tell me at the beginning until I went to my workplace. This is the first time I came to know about Saber,” she said.
The judgment day
Mahmoud who was given a half a decade jail term was found guilty of attempting to conceal crucial information about the case.
The death of Abuk sparked outrage from within South Sudan, with most people calling for justice for the slain girl.
At the court precincts yesterday, hundreds of Aweil residents and human rights activists turned to put more pressure on the judiciary to spell severe punishment on the culprits.
The ruling comes a week after a group of South Sudanese lawyers and journalists began the initiative of advocating for the modification of legislation and the death penalty for rapists in the country.
