9/10/ 2002

NIGERIA: Nigerians Unaware of Stoning Decree

2 Nigerians, 1 a woman 8 months pregnant, have still not been told that a court has sentenced them to death by stoning for having sex outside marriage, their lawyer said Tuesday.

 Ahmadu Ibrahim, 35, and Fatima Usman, 32, are being held in a federal jail and were not freed to attend the court hearing in August that sentenced them to death, said lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim. The couple were sentenced under Islamic law, or shariah, which allows amputations for theft or death by stoning for adultery.

 Prison officials will only allow family and lawyers to see the couple on the condition that they do not tell them of the death sentence, Ibrahim said. Officials did not explain why the couple could not be told, she added.

 Usman, the woman, is being kept in a cramped, unventilated room, her father Umaru Usman told reporters.

 "She's not aware that she's going to be stoned to death," he said through a translator.

 "She was not looking very good," said Ibrahim, who met Usman in jail last week. "For now our concentration is to get them, especially the lady, out."

 A bail hearing for the couple was canceled Tuesday when the judge failed to appear, saying in a message to the court that he was attending a naming ceremony for his newborn daughter. The Upper Shariah Court in the central town of New Gawu rescheduled the hearing for Oct. 22.

 Prison officials refused to release the couple to attend Tuesday's hearing.

 The couple were sentenced a week after another Islamic court rejected single mother Amina Lawal's appeal of a stoning sentence for having sex outside of marriage.

 Lawal's case provoked an international outcry. Governments and human rights groups around the world have urged President Olusegun Obasanjo's administration to intercede.

 The two former lovers were charged and prosecuted by federal police despite Obasanjo's previous objections to shariah. He has condemned strict shariah punishments as unconstitutional.

 The woman's father, Umaru Usman, played a central role in the former lovers' predicament.

 He first brought their affair to the attention of police when he tried to sue his daughter's lover for $1,200 in child support after she gave birth to Ibrahim's child while married to another man, court officials said.

 His failed suit triggered a police investigation that led to the couple being sentenced to 5 years in prison because they couldn't pay a fine of $120 each.

 His attempts to persuade court officials to reduce the sentence by forcing a review backfired. Shariah court officials ruled that both be stoned to death.

 "All I want is a fair hearing," Usman said. "If this continues...I will lose my daughter, I will lose everything."

 Ibrahim is the 1st man to be sentenced to death for adultery in Nigeria. Previously only women were prosecuted and their children used as evidence while men escaped punishment because of lack of proof.

 Usman was the third Nigerian woman condemned to death under Islamic law for having sex out of wedlock. The 1st, Safiya Hussaini, had her sentence overturned in March on appeal.

 Nigeria is deeply divided about the application of shariah.

 Decisions by a dozen states in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north to adopt the Islamic code since 1999 sparked clashes with the region's Christian minority that have killed thousands.

South Africa Press Agency

NIGERIA: Nigerian lovers do not know they face stoning

 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 today.

 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.

 Hauwa Ibrahim, their lawuer, said, 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, tomorrow 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 world wide condemnation.

 Husseini was cleared on appeal, but Lawal is still waiting for a date to be set for her next hearing.