Kano: 12 Arrested By Nigeria’s Sharia Police Over HOMOSEXUAL Wedding

Tuesday 27 January 2015

Kano: 12 Arrested By Nigeria’s Sharia Police Over HOMOSEXUAL Wedding

Report gathering steams from the north Nigeria vast city of Kano suggest that 12 young men have been arrested for allegedly planning a gay wedding.

According to the head of the Islamic law-enforcement agency [the Hisbah] Aminu Daurawa, on Tuesday, the suspects, most of them teenagers, were detained on Monday at a popular resort on the outskirts of the city.

“We have 12 men in custody, including the bride. We arrested them at the venue of a planned gay wedding,” Daurawa told AFP.

“We got information of the wedding four days earlier and our men stormed the venue while the wedding was about to start.”

Many guests escaped during the raid, he added.

But one of the participants, 18-year-old Faruk Maiduguri, told reporters at the Hisbah offices that he and his friends were only celebrating his birthday.

“It was my birthday party, not a gay wedding,” he said in tears.

Daurawa further said the suspects, who arrived Kano from the northern cities of Maiduguri, Kaduna and Bauchi, and Ibadan and Osogbo in the southwest, “looked and acted feminine”, which prompted their arrest.

It was not clear whether they would be charged but their families had been summoned, he added.

Homosexuality is banned under federal law in Nigeria, where last year new legislation was passed outlawing same-sex marriages and the promotion of civil unions.

In northern states, where Sharia runs parallel to the state and federal justice system, homosexuality is punishable by death, although the sentence is rarely, if ever, enforced.