Missing non-Muslim minor reappears in Kano State

A seventeen-year-old girl has been spotted at the Kano State Shari’a Commission headquarters in Kano City, seven weeks after disappearing from her home.

Alheri Musa had seemingly vanished without trace on 8 April. However, when her anxious parents heard of her whereabouts and attempted to visit her today, they were informed that she had become a Muslim, that her name has been changed to Maryam, and that they could not see her because Friday is a holy day. They have been ordered to return to the Commission on Tuesday 1 June.

The abduction, conversion and forcible marriage of under-age non-Muslim girls occur regularly in many of northern Nigeria’s Shari’a states, despite the fact that under Nigerian law, a minor cannot convert without parental permission. In an earlier case in Kano, Rahab Iliya, a minor who attended an Anglican Church in Gidan Tati in Yayabakwai, was detained by the Shari’a police or Hisba, forcibly converted and married to a Muslim man in late 2009. Earlier that year a young orphan suffered a similar fate in Kano.

Commenting on the case, the Reverend Yunusa Nmadu, CEO of CSW Nigeria said: “It is regrettable that this kind of activity continues to occur despite Nigeria’s national and international legal obligations, and in defiance of African custom, which respects the authority of parents over their children. This kind of impunity is incompatible with the democracy that we claim to practice. We call on the Federal Government to end this abuse of law and custom by civil servants paid with tax payers’ money, and to ensure that Alheri Musa is returned to the custody of her parents without further delay.”