What the *@!K is wrong with these people? This has to be some kind of sick joke.
Nigerian State Says Miss World Reporter Should Die
By Tume Ahemba
KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - A Nigerian Muslim state said Tuesday it had issued a “fatwa” urging a death sentence for the author of a newspaper story on the Miss World (news - web sites) pageant that sparked deadly riots in northern Nigeria.
More than 200 people died in the violence in the northern city of Kaduna.
Muslims were enraged by the November 16 article which suggested the Prophet Mohammad would probably have married one of the contestants in the pageant, which has been relocated from Nigeria to London because of the bloodshed.
“What we are saying is that the Holy Koran has clearly stated that whoever insults the Prophet of Islam, Mohammad, should be killed,” Zamfara State Commissioner for Information Umar Dangaladima Magaji told Reuters.
Asked to clarify the government’s pronouncement, Magaji said the state had “passed a fatwa.”
“It’s a fatwa. It is based on the request of the people,” he said, adding that this did not contradict the authority of Islamic clerics who have the powers to decree death sentences.
“Being a leader you can pass a fatwa,” Magaji said.
Magaji said a number of Islamic associations in the state had asked the government to take action. The government had decided a fatwa was appropriate and could defuse anger that might otherwise lead to further bloodshed.
The Kaduna-based New Nigerian newspaper said the “fatwa” was issued by Zamfara’s Deputy Governor Mamuda Aliyu Dallatun Shinkafi, who compared Isioma Daniel with British author Salman Rushdie, sentenced to death by Iranian Muslim clerics.
“Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of the ThisDay writer can be shed,” the paper quoted its reporter, who attended rally at which the Shinkafi made the pronouncement, as saying.
NORTHERN NIGERIA TENSIONS
Zamfara was the first Nigerian state to adopt strict Islamic sharia law, soon after the end of military rule in Nigeria in 1999. Attempts to introduce the sharia code in the neighboring state of Kaduna sparked protests and riots from non-Muslims that killed some 3,000 people in February 2000.
The Kaduna office of ThisDay, which published the article linking the Miss World beauty queens with the Prophet Mohammad, was razed last week by Muslim youths.
ThisDay editors told Reuters that Daniel, the paper’s style editor, had fled to the United States after tendering her resignation in the wake of the crisis.
The editor of the Saturday edition of the paper in which the article appeared was arrested for questioning but has since been released, the editors said.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, speaking from Abuja Monday in an interview with CNN, said “irresponsible journalism” was to blame for Nigeria’s latest communal bloodletting.
Religious leaders have warned the violence could torpedo Nigeria’s presidential elections next year, already overshadowed by the country’s worst cycle of religious and political violence since independence from Britain in 1960.
The Miss World pageant was hastily relocated to London, but there pageant organizers came up against more opposition with media and lobby groups accusing them of having blood on their hands.
Trucks ferried bodies from hospitals in Nigeria’s northern city of Kaduna for mass burials Monday as calm returned after the violence.
Troops enforced a curfew six days after Christian-Muslim riots broke out. The Red Cross said Monday the death toll was 215, while civil rights and hospital sources put the figure at 250.
