Two Sharia Court workers have been arrested for allegedly forging Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps official letterhead papers which they used to scam desperate job seekers.
The suspects, Ibrahim Usman and Shuaibu Yinusa, who worked with the Sharia Court in Gwagwalada, Abuja, had realised N6 million from the many applicants they scammed.
The suspects, who were paraded in Abuja on Friday, were arrested at Gwagwalada with forged appointment letters and other fake NSCDC documents.
Usman told journalists that he had made about N6 million from the scam, adding that he extorted various amounts of money from applicants.
He said, “I collected various amounts from different people, some paid N20,000, some N50,000. I told interested people in my village that there is a job opportunity and many of them brought money to me.”
But his accomplice, Yinusa, denied involvement in the scam, saying he was arrested because he was at Usman’s house when NSCDC operatives came to arrest him.
“I don’t know anything about this incident, I was arrested because I was at Usman’s house when they came to arrest him,” he stated.
Twelve young men were arrested in Kano for allegedly planning a gay wedding, the Islamic law-enforcement agency, the Hisbah, said on Tuesday.
Gays arrested
The suspects, most of them teenagers, were detained on Monday at a popular resort on the outskirts of the city, said the head of the Hisbah, Aminu Daurawa.
Homosexuality is banned under federal law in Nigeria, where last year new legislation was passed outlawing same-sex marriages and the promotion of civil unions.
In northern states, where Sharia runs parallel to the state and federal justice system, homosexuality is punishable by death, although the sentence is rarely, if ever, enforced.
“We have 12 men in custody, including the bride. We arrested them at the venue of a planned gay wedding,” Daurawa told AFP.
“We got information of the wedding four days earlier and our men stormed the venue while the wedding was about to start.”
Many guests escaped during the raid, he added.
But one of the participants, 18-year-old Faruk Maiduguri, told reporters at the Hisbah offices that he and his friends were only celebrating his birthday.
“It was my birthday party, not a gay wedding,” he said in tears.
Daurawa said the suspects, who came from Kano, the northern cities of Maiduguri, Kaduna and Bauchi, and Ibadan and Osogbo in the southwest, “looked and acted feminine”, which prompted their arrest.
It was not clear whether they would be charged but their families had been summoned, he added.
In January last year, more than a dozen men suspected of organising a gay wedding were arrested and charged in Bauchi by the Sharia agency.
Some of them were discharged while others were released on bail.
Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act carries penalties of up to 14 years in jail for anyone confirmed to be in a gay union.
The government said the legislation reflected public opinion in religiously conversative Nigeria, which is split almost evenly between a mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.
But gay rights activists in Nigeria and abroad, the United Nations and Western countries, including the United States, attacked the law as a breach of human rights.
A packed Kano State High Court, yesterday, heard testimony that a 14-year-old girl admitted to killing her 35-year-old husband with rat poison, and signed a police confession with a thumbprint because she cannot write.
The girl, from a poor and conservative Muslim family, has been charged with murdering her husband, Umar Sani, days after their marriage in Kano State.
Because she does not understand English, homicide investigator Abdullahi Adamu translated her statement from the Hausa language.
She could not write her name, so “she had to use a thumbprint,” he told the court, during his testimony on the last day of the prosecution’s case.
Co-wife’s story
The state’s lawyers, who are seeking the death penalty, also called to the stand Tasi’u’s co-wife, identified as Ramatu.
Ramatu said she got along well with Tasi’u and that the two had prepared the food together on April 5, the day Sani died.
She testified that because it was Tasi’u’s turn to share bed with Sani, Tasi’u was also entitled to serve his meal.
“After putting the food in the dish, I did not see anybody put anything in it,” Ramatu said.
She said later her husband was helped back to the house by a neighbour, unable to walk and foaming at the mouth.
The court overflowed, with crowd spilling out of the gallery door and people peering in through the open windows.
The case has sparked outrage among human rights activists, who say Nigeria should be treating Tasi’u as a victim, noting the possibility that she was raped by the man she married.
Sharia
However, others in the region, including relatives of the defendant and the deceased, have rejected the notion that Tasi’u was forced into marriage.
They have said that 14 is a common age to marry and that Tasi’u chose Sani from among many suitors.
A motion by defence lawyers to have the case moved to juvenile court was rejected, despite claims by human rights lawyers that she was too young to stand trial for murder in a high court.
Further complicating the case is the role of Sharia, which allows children to marry according to some interpretations.
While sharia is technically in force in Kano, law enforcement officials have no guidelines concerning how it should be balanced with the secular criminal codes, creating a complex legal hybrid system.
According to Human Rights Watch, Nigeria is not known to have executed a juvenile offender since 1997.
The trial has been adjourned until February 16, 2015.
