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Alleged Blasphemy: Soyinka raise questions why Deborah Samuel killers haven’t be prosecuted

Deborah, a second-year Christian college student, was accused of blasphemy against Islam and was stoned to death on May 12, 2022, in Sokoto, northwest Nigeria, by a mob of Muslim students.

Two years after Deborah Samuel Yakubu was brutally murdered and set ablaze by a mob in Sokoto for alleged blasphemy, Nobel Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka lamented the absence of justice for Deborah.

Deborah, a second-year Christian college student, was accused of blasphemy against Islam and was stoned to death on May 12, 2022, in Sokoto, northwest Nigeria, by a mob of Muslim students.

Soyinka, the guest speaker at the PUNCH 50th Anniversary Public presentation on Thursday, expressed his sadness that none of Deborah’s killers had been brought to justice during his presentation on the topic of “Recovering the Narrative.”

The Nigerian government was ordered to resume an investigation into the nearly 40-year-old murder of prominent journalist Dele Giwa earlier this month by a Federal High Court in Abuja.

In October 1986, a parcel bomb killed 39-year-old Mr Giwa at his home in Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.

Soyinka stated, “Now the death of Dele Giwa is close to 50 years (40 years). If last week, a judge still found it possible, logical and constitutional to order the Attorney General of the nation to bring Dele Giwa’s killers to justice, then what happened in the case of Deborah Samuel?

“Just what happened there? Why? Is that case merely forgotten already? It went beyond that. It was not just that Deborah Samuel was killed and that the suspects were set free, we discovered months later, just recently that there was another woman, who had been in prison for daring to make a video condemning the lynching of Deborah Samuel. She was released eventually I think after spending 13 months in jail as a result of the work of human rights and some Christian associations.

“The insult goes even further. Turn to social media, you will see that till today one of the killers posing and holding up a box of matches, saying in effect, this is the instrument with which I committed a final act, which was setting Deborah Samuel’s body on fire.

“He has not been arrested, he has not been charged for inciting hate.”

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Jonathan Nwokpor

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Olusola Augustine Sokefun says:

March 8, 2024 at 6:34 am

These bandits would seize Nigeria someday if the govt cannot curb or totally eradicate this menace from our land.I still wonder why it is so easy to abduct 200 individuals at a time without security agents knowing about it. There is something fundamentally wrong with Nigetia