Sharia court sentences man to death for adultery

A man in the northern state of Bauchi has become the first male to be sentenced to death for adultery by a sharia court in Nigeria.

Yunusa Chiyawa was convicted and sentenced last week in the town of Ningi for eloping with the wife of his friend and having sex with her, an official of the state’s judiciary said on 28 June. He was given 30 days to file an appeal. The woman was acquitted after the presiding judge accepted her claim that Chiyawa had put a spell on her.

Chiyawa is the first man to receive a death sentence for adultery under Sharia law, adopted by 12 states in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north over the past two and a half years. Two women had previously received such sentences. The first was Safiya Husseini, whose conviction in Sokoto State was overturned by an appeal court. The appeal of the second woman, Amina Lawal, is pending. In the meantime, she has been given 18 months by a Sharia appeal court in Katsina State to wean her baby.

The only death sentence carried out so far under Sharia law was the January hanging in Katsina of a man convicted of killing a woman and her two children.

The introduction of strict Islamic law has sharply divided multi-ethnic Nigeria’s 120 million population along religious lines, reinforcing suspicion between the south, most of whose people are Christian or follow traditional religions, and the mainly Muslim north.

More than 2,000 people died in clashes between Christians and Muslims in the northern state of Kaduna in early 2000 over plans by state authorities to introduce the Sharia. An additional 300 lives were lost in reprisal attacks against Muslim northerners in parts of southeast Nigeria.

The government of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a southern Christian, has condemned harsh punishments meted out under Sharia law as unconstitutional. However, ostensibly to avoid aggravating already frayed religious nerves, he has refrained from enforcing his position or seeking Supreme Court intervention, as some of his critics had demanded.