Nigerian Woman Avoids Stoning Death

March 25 -- Safiya Hussaini broke into a broad, almost toothless smile in a courtroom in the northern Nigerian town of Sokoto today as she learned that she was spared being partially buried while being stoned to death for allegedly committing adultery.

An impoverished mother of five from the remote Tungar Tudu village in northern Nigeria, Hussaini has been at the center of an international uproar since a lower 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 last October.

The conviction was met with an international outcry that pressured the Nigerian justice minister to issue a statement last week, denouncing the extreme punishments meted out by the country's sharia courts as unconstitutional.

In Sokoto today, the campaign for Hussaini appeared to have worked when a sharia judge, under the glare of the media, overruled the ruling on procedural grounds, maintaining that since the alleged act had taken place before adultery became a criminal offence in the region under Islamic law, Hussaini's case was dismissed.

As her sentence was translated from Arabic to her native Hausa today, Hussaini looked around the courtroom to her many well-wishers in the room, hugged her one-year-old daughter and whispered a soft, "thank you, thank you."

But even as human rights groups welcomed the verdict, it emerged that another woman, Amina Lawal Kuram, had been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery in Bakori, in the northern Nigerian state of Katsina.

"We have confirmed that a woman in Katsina has been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery," said Michael Hammer, Amnesty International's deputy program director for Africa. "Our people in Nigeria are looking into the matter and we have no further details on the case. But needless to say, this highlights the fact that the issue of the implementation of sharia-based penal codes is still with us."

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