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Fri 01 July 2022:
An official in northern Nigeria’s Bauchi state said Friday that a court sentenced three men to death by stoning for raping two boys.
Bauchi is one of a dozen states in mostly Muslim northern Nigeria where Sharia law coexists with traditional criminal justice.
The sentences were handed down by a court in the town of Ningi on Wednesday, according to Sharia police or Hisbah officer Adamu Dankafi.
He claimed they were accused of raping two boys after drugging them.
Raping minors is punishable by death under Nigeria’s Sharia law, although like most other death sentences it has never been enforced. In this case, the men were charged under a law related to homosexual acts.
“The Upper Sharia Court One in Ningi handed down the death sentence on the three men for committing homosexual acts with two brothers aged 10 and 12,” Dankafi said.
“The three are to be stoned to death as prescribed by the Bauchi state Sharia penal code based on their confessions during interrogation by our men and before the court,” he said.
He said the men were arrested in Gwada village in May following complaints by parents of the two boys who said they had been drugged before the act.
Dankafi stated that the males, ages 20 to 70, were not represented by a lawyer during the one-day trial, and that they have one month to appeal the sentence.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is almost evenly divided between the mostly Christian south and the predominantly Muslim north.
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