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Oscar will embrace sentence - uncle

Pretoria - Paralympian Oscar Pistorius will embrace the five-year prison sentence handed down by the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, his uncle Arnold said on Tuesday.

"We accept the judgment. Oscar will embrace the sentence," Arnold told media after sentence was handed down by Judge Thokozile Masipa.

"As an uncle, I hope Oscar will start the healing process as he walks this path and serves the sentence."

Arnold was flanked by his wife Lois. The couple declined to take questions from media.

He said the case and the court trial had been a harrowing 20 months since the bail application.

"We are all emotionally drained and exhausted. The case was initially set for three weeks, but dragged on for seven months."

Arnold attacked the State's case, and said the prosecution tried everything they could "to make the premeditated murder charge stick".

"The State wanted to inflict as much damage as possible," he said.

He urged the media to accept the judgment and let the families, including the Steenkamps, move forward.

Judge Masipa sentenced Pistorius to five years in jail for culpable homicide.

For discharging a firearm at Tasha's restaurant he was sentenced to three years in jail, suspended for five years. The sentences would run concurrently.

On 12 September, Masipa found Pistorius guilty of the culpable homicide of his girlfriend, model and law graduate Reeva Steenkamp, but not guilty of her murder.

Pistorius had claimed he thought there was a burglar in his toilet when he fired four shots through the locked door in the early hours of 14 February last year, killing Steenkamp.

Masipa also found Pistorius guilty of discharging a firearm in public, when he shot from his friend Darren Fresco's Glock pistol under a table at Tasha's restaurant in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, in January 2013.

Pistorius was found not guilty on two firearms-related charges - illegal possession of ammunition, and shooting through the open sunroof of a car with his 9mm pistol while driving with friends in Modderfontein on 30 September 2012.

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