Nigerian Woman Fights Stoning Death

March 18 -- Her crime, according to the elders, is having sex outside marriage and for that, Safiya Hussaini has been sentenced to death by stoning, a decree that has placed this impoverished woman from the remote northern Nigerian village of Tungar Tudu at the center of an international uproar.

In October 2001, an Islamic court found Hussaini guilty of adultery and under sharia, or Islamic law, sentenced her to be stoned to death while buried up to her waist in sand.

In interviews with Western journalists in recent days, some Muslim clerics in the region have carefully explained that Hussaini would be buried in a pit to prevent her escape and that the size of the stones could be a big as an adult fist.

But Hussaini, a mother of five who looks a lot older than her 37 years, is not prepared to go without a fight. She has launched an appeals process that threatens to spark religious tensions in a society simmering with violent Muslim-Christian disharmony.

Unequal Treatment Alleged

Dressed in a tightly secured white veil with her 1-year-old baby girl, Adama, in her arms, Hussaini arrived at the appeals hearing in the regional capital of Sokoto today as the international community carefully monitored the situation in one of Nigeria's most contentious legal cases.

In a packed courtroom, with her daughter crying throughout the proceedings, the four judges today delayed a decision until March 25.

European Union parliamentarians have joined international human rights groups in condemning the sentencing. In a country where thousands have been killed in Muslim-Christian violence since 1999, when sharia started being imposed in a dozen northern states, Hussaini has turned into the unwitting face of a touchy legal issue.

And though Hussaini is illiterate, she has, in the past, displayed a worldly wisdom about the circumstances she now finds herself in.

"Others have committed worse crimes but have not been punished because they have influence in high places," she told the British Broadcasting Corp. in an interview last week. "But this is happening to me — a poor woman from a poor village."