Of kid abductor: Good riddance

In what appears to be an interesting twist, the parents of 18-year-old Samson Petro say they will neither mourn their son nor prepare his burial because of the senseless and intolerable acts he was doing before he died.

The dead man’s family resides at Stamico village in Ludete Ward of Katoro district in Geita region. Police officers killed him on Wednesday morning last week during a failed attempt to escape custody, says Arusha Regional Police Commander Charles Mkumbo.

He was the prime suspect in the brutal murder of Moureen Daudi, six, and Ikram Salim, aged three, whose bodies were found dumped in a pit on Tuesday in Olasiti ward. The parents of the two kids said the kidnappers had demanded ransoms amounting to millions of shillings for their release.

In an interview with the ‘Daily News’, Mr Petro Aroon, the father of the deceased said the punishment he faced from the law enforcers was enough for him and that he deserved it.

In that regard, he says he doesn’t deserve any burial ceremony from his family; instead, he should be laid to rest at graveyards run by local government authorities.

Flanked by his wife Neema Mussa, Mr Aroon who is a businessman and a father of seven, said the family had received news of his death without ‘any shock’ because all of them knew that, in any case, he would die that way due to his reckless lifestyle within the community.

Narrating the story of his son, Mr Aroon said the dead man was “a very stubborn young man” and so a “notorious” thief within both the family and the surrounding community that he was consequently expelled from the village.

“We cannot complain on what befell him … and we can equally not blame anyone because we knew his behaviour…we do not expect to travel to Arusha to collect his body, let the authorities bury him there,’’ he insisted.

He added that his son ran away from his family in June this year and travelled to Arusha where he was received by his cousin who is a police officer.

While in Arusha, he added, Samson joined groups of hooligans who were abducting people but his cousin had no idea about what was going on behind him, because he saw him as an innocent young man, not the notorious person he was in real life.

“He opted to hide himself in Arusha after stealing a television set of one of the teachers here known as Kato … who however forgave him … after police arrested him … and later forced him to show them where he had sold it,’’ his father narrated.

At some point, he said, the villagers had threatened to set his house on fire if he did not expel his son who had then become “a menace” within the village for his propensity to steal from neighbours.

Mr Aroon added that he could not even complete his secondary school because when he was enrolled in school he started stealing from his teachers and fellow students, and that when parents convened at the school meeting they proposed that he be expelled from school -- because he had started creating ‘criminal gangs’ at schools that were likely to ruin the future of their own children.

The deceased’s mother, Neema Mussa, said the death of her son should serve as a lesson to all parents on how best they could raise their children. On her part, the death of the errant son did not come as a surprise although she admitted she would miss him