A pregnant Nigerian woman and her former lover serving jail terms for adultery have not been told that they have been sentenced to death by stoning, their lawyer said on Monday.
Fatima Usman (32) and her former boyfriend Ahmed Ibrahim, (35) were sentenced to death by an Islamic court in the central Nigerian state of Niger for having sex outside of marriage.
But, their lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim says they were not present at the sentencing and prison authorities have forbidden their legal team from informing them of their sentence. ”We were not allowed to meet them alone, and we were told that a condition of seeing them was that we did not tell them of their sentence,” Ibrahim said.
”It saddens my heart as an officer of the Nigerian Bar Association that cases like this are going on,” she said. The lawyer is due to appear in the upper Sharia court in Gawu, Niger state, on Tuesday to apply for bail for the former lovers while plans for an appeal are drawn up.
If the accused are allowed to attend the hearing it could be the first time they become aware of the sentence, Ibrahim said. Usman, whose two-and-a-half year old daughter was allegedly fathered by Ibrahim, is eight months pregnant with the child of her ex-husband and appears to have fallen ill, she added.
”She did not talk much, perhaps because the guards were present, but she looked very bad and she complained of pains in her legs,” she said.
The reintroduction of the Islamic legal code, or Sharia, with its harsh range of punishments in 12 mainly Muslim states has sparked controversy both inside and outside Nigeria. Ibrahim said that the case of the former lovers was an example of how Sharia, whatever its merits as a legal system, is being imposed unfairly by ill-prepared courts. ”This is just one incident we’ve come across, there could be 101 more,” she said.
No-one has yet been stoned to death since the states took the opportunity of the 1999 return to civilian rule to start re-imposing the law code. But the cases of two single mothers — Amina Lawal and Safiya Husseini — who were sentenced to death for bearing children out of wedlock drew worldwide condemnation. Husseini was cleared on appeal, but Lawal is still waiting for a date to be set for her next hearing. – Sapa-AFP