A team of Sharia police known as the Hisbah Corps patrols the streets of Kano in October 2013.
A Nigerian atheist and outspoken doubter of religion was punished to 24 years in jail on Tuesday after pleading guilty to blasphemy costs in the mainly Muslim northern state of Kano, in a judgment that puts a limelight on spiritual flexibilities in the country.
Fees against Mubarak Bala are linked to remarks he published on Facebook in April 2020 that were important of Islam and which authorities in Kano considered cursing as well as an insult to the religious beliefs, his attorney claimed.
When asked by Kano High Court Judge Farouk Lawan whether he had actually been pushed to go into a guilty plea to the 18 costs, Bala said he did so of his very own free choice.
Bala, that heads the Humanist Organization of Nigeria, was arrested at his house in the northern Kaduna state two years back and also was after that relocated to neighbouring Kano, a majority Muslim as well as conservative state.
The Humanist Organization stated Tuesday that Mubarak’s guilty plea “was not part of the arranged lawful strategy, as well as came as a shock (to) his legal group.”
” It is most likely that he went through intimidation, and also can have been fooled right into pleading guilty in the hopes of a light sentence,” the organization added in a declaration on its site.
Bala’s legal representative, James Ibor, claimed Tuesday’s sentencing was “very outrageous” as well as could be challenged.
” The sentence infringes his right as an atheist,” Ibor told Reuters.
Kano’s Commissioner for Info, Mohammed Garba, informed CNN on Wednesday that the state government “would follow the judgments of the court.”
Convictions for blasphemy are not brand-new in Kano, where a variation of Sharia legislation runs as well as is imposed by a spiritual police called the Hisbah Corps.
Two years earlier, a 22-year-old songs workshop aide, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, was sentenced to death by hanging after being convicted by an Islamic court in Kano of making “a cursing declaration versus Prophet Mohammed in a WhatsApp team.”
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Resources: CNN
Last Updated: 12 April 2022
