Christiana Oluwatoyin Oluwasesin was happy and full of life when she arrived at the Government Secondary School in Gandu, Gombe State, northern Nigeria, on March 21, 2007, where she teaches government. This married mother of two has already submitted a resignation application to the government to join her husband Femi in her hometown of Abeokuta where she has started working as a laboratory technician in a hospital. She was happy to be with her husband again on that fateful day shortly after the last day of exams, but her joy about the last day of school didn’t last long. That day, , students, mostly Muslims aged 12 to 14 and outside Islamic extremists, killed Oluwasesin after accusing her of desecrating a copy of the Quran. The mob stoned her, stripped her naked, beat and stabbed her, and her body was then burned beyond recognition. The incident, which remains unsolved, has reignited the debate about religious freedom and the sanctity of human life in Nigeria. On March 21, Oluwasesin was leading a class taking the final examination in Islamic Religious Studies and in order to avoid cheating and other errors in the examination, he collected books, papers and bags from the women’s class before the start of the examination and left Aluke Musa Yila. , a colleague at the school, told Compass, although other local reports indicate she threw the materials out of the classroom. “Normally, these items are returned to each student when each student returns their answer script,” said Yila, who said he witnessed the gruesome murder of Oluwasesin. “Soon after the bags collected by Oluwasesin were placed in front of the class, one of the girls in the class started crying. She told her friends that she had a copy of the Quran in her bag, that Oluwasesin touched the bag and thus desecrated the Quran because she was a Christian. Soon, the students in the class started shouting, “Allahu Akbar (God is great).” » “At that time, I was fascinated by the noisy scene in the classroom and ran there,” said Yila. “How could the teacher have known that the student’s bag contained a copy of the Quran if he had not been made aware of it? Yila alerted school staff, who rushed to the scene to try to calm the situation. In this way, Yila was able to take Oluwasesin from the classroom to the principal’s office. “The principal left me and Oluwasesin in his office and also went there to pacify the Muslim students. Knowing that students might come to this office soon, I pushed Oluwasesin into the toilet of this office and then closed the office,” he said.
He then returned to the scene and was shocked to find that Muslim extremists had joined the mayhem, destroying school grounds and demanding that Oluwasesin be handed over to them to be stoned. The crowd believed he had torn up a copy of the Koran, a book considered sacred by more than a billion people, and that it was a sin. “When we couldn’t give up Oluwasesin and hand them over, they started stoning us,” Yila said. Amid the violence, school authorities and police could not access Oluwasesin to rescue her as students pelted her with stones, forcing her to retreat. “While we were wondering how to get Oluwasesin out of the school, the Muslims broke into the principal’s office and dragged her out,” Yila said. “The director ran there to save her when they hit her head with an iron and blood flowed from the injured side of her head. She begged them not to kill her, but they insisted that she be killed. » “The principal managed to bring Christiana Oluwasesin to the school gate,” he said. “There was a house near the gate and he took him inside, but the Muslim rebels entered the house and took him out. This time they beat her to death, brought old mats and sprinkled earth on her body, then burned it. The students proceeded and set fire to the classrooms, the library, Oluwasesin’s car and Yila’s motorcycle, causing him to flee. Firefighters later said they were unable to reach the site because all roads leading to the school, which has about 4,000 students, about 10% of whom are Christians, were blocked. Following the incident, 16 suspects were arrested but released without charge, angering many human rights groups, including Nigeria’s Christian community. Oluwasesin’s husband Femi and his children took the matter to court demanding that the state government take responsibility and compensate the family for his wife’s death. However, the Federal High Court in Gombe refused to hear the case as there were insufficient safeguards to maintain public order during the trial. With the help of an NGO, Femi sued the state government in the Federal Court in Yola in neighboring Adamawa State. The case is still pending as of 2010.
“[My children] constantly remind me of my dear wife and how much we both want to raise them in the spirit of the Lord. “I have no choice but to forgive those who killed my wife even though justice has not yet prevailed,” Femi was quoted as saying. Femi met and married Christiana Oluwasesin on August 28, 2003. The two men went to Gombe program compulsory one-year national service for Nigerian government youth After one year of service, they were employed by the Gombe state government, his wife got a job as a teacher and he became a laboratory technician in a local hospital. In addition to learning to live with the loss of his wife, Femi also received death threats in 2010 via anonymous calls telling him to withdraw a complaint he had lodged against the state government. What surprises many about all this is that in all the chaos that killed Christiana Oluwasesin, the supposedly desecrated copy of the Quran was never seen. “Nobody knows whether the Koran was in this student’s bag,” Yila said.
