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Please What's your opinion on this.
Nigerian prosecutors said on Thursday they may seek
the death penalty against a 14-year-old girl accused of
murdering her 35-year-old husband by putting rat
poison in his food.
The trial of Wasila Tasi’u, from a poor northern Nigeria
family, has sparked a heated debate on the role of
underage marriage in the conservative Muslim region,
especially whether an adolescent girl can consent to be
a bride.
Prosecutors at the High Court in Gezawa, outside
Nigeria’s second city of Kano, filed an amended
complaint that charged Tasi’u with one count of
murder over the killing of Umar Sani two weeks after
their April wedding in the village of Unguwar Yansoro.
Lead prosecutor Lamido Abba Soron-Dinki said that if
proved, the charge is “punishable with death” and
indicated the state would seek the maximum penalty.
Tasi’u entered the court wearing a cream-coloured hijab
and was escorted by two policemen.
Her parents, who have condemned their daughter’s
alleged act, were in the public gallery — the first time
the three were in the same room since Tasi’u’s arrest in
April, her legal representatives said.
The English-language charge sheet was translated into
Hausa for the accused by the court clerk.
Tasi’u refused to answer when asked if she understood
the charges.
The case was adjourned for 30 minutes so the charges
could be better explained to the defendant, but when
the alleged offences were read again Tasi’u stayed
silent, turned her head to the wall and broke down in
tears.
“The court records (that) she pleads not guilty,” Judge
Mohammed Yahaya said, apparently regarding her
silence as equal to a denial of the charges and
adjourned the case until November 26.
Activists, including in Nigeria’s mainly Christian
south, have called for Tasi’u’s immediate release,
saying she should be rehabilitated as a victim and
noting the prospect that she was raped by the man she
married.
But in the north, Islamic law operates alongside the
secular criminal code, a hybrid system that has
complicated the question of marital consent.
The affected families have denied that Tasi’u was forced
into marriage, arguing that girls across the
impoverished region marry at 14 and that Tasi’u and
Sani followed the traditional system of courtship.
According to Nigeria’s marriage act, anyone under 21
can marry provided they have parental consent and so
evidence of an agreement between Tasi’u and her father
Tasiu Mohammed could undermine claims of a forced
union.
But defence lawyer Hussaina Aliyu has insisted the
case is not a debate about the role of youth marriage in
a Muslim society.
Instead, she has argued that under criminal law a 14-
year-old cannot be charged with murder in a high
court and has demanded that the case be moved to the
juvenile system
The Vanguard
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