Suzan Vivian Ariokot, the prime suspect among six people accused of murdering Joan Faith Apio, a pupil at Jozan Nursery and Primary School, has told the High Court that police may have tampered with her phone containing CCTV footage that could support her defence.
Ariokot made the claim during the hearing of her defence after her lawyers, Francis Ajuun and Joseph Odong, told the court that they had been unable to obtain CCTV footage from Pride Bank and Soroti Regional Referral Hospital, which they consider crucial to their case. The lawyers have instead turned to CCTV footage from Ariokot’s shop along Soroti Main Street, which they say could establish that she was at the shop and not at the scene of Apio’s murder on February 5, 2025.
Apio was found dead in the school’s latrine on the same day. The High Court has since found that the prosecution established a prima facie case, requiring the six accused to present their defence. The accused are school directors Ariokot and Joseph Okedi, headteacher James Edoket, school cook Valentine Opio, school matron Osula Adong and police officer John Bosco Obotol. All have denied the murder charges. During the hearing, Justice Boniface Wamala directed Ariokot to identify the phone linked to the CCTV system and have it charged within the court premises so that the footage could be extracted.
After the phone was charged, Ariokot was given time to unlock it and retrieve the videos. However, shortly afterwards, her lawyer Ajuun told the court that the footage she had stored on the phone before her arrest was missing. According to Ajuun, the missing videos included footage that Ariokot intended to rely on to show that she was at her shop when Apio was killed. He also said Ariokot reported that other videos she had previously submitted to the office of the East Region Police Commander were missing.
Ariokot told court that on February 11, 2025, she was summoned to the East Kyoga Regional Police over allegations that she had killed Apio. She said she went to the police with three phones to demonstrate her innocence and played the CCTV footage for officers before the phones were seized.
She accused the scene-of-crime officer, whom she said was the first police officer to handle the phones, of improperly taking them and accessing the footage. “When I was detained and taken to Serere CPS, I left the police still watching that footage that was in my phone,” Ariokot told court.
She explained that her shop had a CCTV camera covering the premises and that the system was connected to her phone through Airtel mobile data. “There was a setting on my phone for every footage to save directly. The footage was saving automatically to the phone and capturing everything in the shop,” she said.
Ariokot also told court that she used the phone to store other files, including her wedding videos, but was unsure how long CCTV footage could remain on the device before being automatically deleted. After hearing the defence’s concerns over the missing footage, Justice Wamala ordered that Pride Bank Headquarters in Kampala be served with a notice requiring the bank to provide CCTV footage from February 5, 2025.
Justice Wamala directed the defence lawyers to travel to Kampala and serve the bank with the order so that the footage could be obtained and presented to court as part of the defence evidence. The case was adjourned to Wednesday, August 12, 2026, for the continuation of the defence hearing, which the court indicated would be the final adjournment for the hearing-URN. Give us feedback on this story through our email: kamwokyatimes@gmail.com
