Dublin – Republic of Ireland.

A colleague of an Irish priest murdered in Uganda has condemned the execution of two soldiers for the killing.

Father Joseph Jones said on Tuesday senior army officers were responsible for killing Father Declan O’Toole, 31, who had been engaged in peace work in northeastern Uganda.

“If the army was involved then they are the ones that should be punished and not those two poor fellows who were executed yesterday, because if they did fire the shots then they were only acting on orders from senior officers,” Jones, a member of St. Joseph’s Society for Foreign Missions, told Irish radio.

“The senior ones were the guilty ones, not these two soldiers who were executed,” Jones said, adding O’Toole had been beaten by army officers two weeks ago after appealing to them to tone down their violence towards locals.

Lt. Peter Twesigye, assistant to the army commander for the eastern division, told the Associated Press the public execution was meant to show that the soldiers acted on their own, not as members of the army:

“We want to show the public that the crime was carried out by individuals, but not by the army as an institution, ” he said.

The soldiers were arrested over the weekend and publicly executed by firing squad on Monday for murdering the priest, his driver and another passenger on Thursday evening in the volatile Karamoja region, which is about 350 km (220 miles) from the capital Kampala.

Army officials have come up with a motive for the killing. Local press reports said Father O’Toole had recently been beaten by soldiers after he accused them of torturing parishioners the army suspected were hiding guns.

The Karamoja region has been unstable for years because of the large number of arms held by the area’s nomadic tribesman.

SOURCE: [ cnn.com, Story by CNN, Original Publication ]