A teenage Nigerian transvestite and seller of love potions who lived undetected for seven years among the married women of his conservative Islamic community has been caught and now faces jail. Abubakar Hamza said this week that he disguised himself as a girl and ran away from his home in a farming village of Ajingi aged only 12.
A renewed drive to immunise Nigerian children living amid the world’s worst outbreak of polio has run into fierce opposition from parents and Islamic teachers. As the five-day campaign approached its end, officials in the northern city of Kano admitted they would not hit its target of vaccinating four million under-fives against the crippling disease.
Health workers in the northern Nigerian state of Kano will on Saturday launch a drive to immunise more than four million infants against polio, despite ongoing opposition from Islamic radicals. Since August last year, Kano has become the epicentre of the world’s fastest-growing outbreak of the crippling virus.
Tensions between Nigeria’s rival Muslim and Christian communities rose sharply on Tuesday, as Islamic leaders addressing a 10Â 000-strong crowd warned of an imminent backlash in the aftermath of a sectarian massacre. The leaders issued President Olusegun Obasanjo with a seven-day ultimatum to put an end to the killings.
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/ 25 November 2002
The Miss World beauty circus fled to Britain on Sunday while in northern Nigeria the death toll continued to mount in bloody sectarian rioting fuelled by Muslim anger at the pageant.