Students, extremists stone, beat and burn her after ‘desecration’ of yet unfound Quran.
GOMBE, Nigeria – Christianah Oluwatoyin Oluwasesin, a teacher at Government Secondary School of Gandu in this northern Nigerian town, was in high spirits last Wednesday (March 21) as she made her way to school where she teaches government.
She was happy that after the final day of exams, she would be joining her husband in their hometown of Abeokuta, in the southwestern state of Ogun; a few months earlier, her husband Femi Oluwasesin had gone to Abeokuta to take a hospital position as a laboratory technician. The high school teacher’s joyous mood had been noted not only that day but the previous one, as she was seen taking pictures and exchanging pleasantries with friends and colleagues.
Soon her happiness would be cut short. Muslim students at the school, along with outside Islamic extremists, murdered Oluwasesin on March 21 over claims that she desecrated the Quran. They beat, stoned, and clubbed her to death, then burned her corpse.
As a supervisor of a class writing a final examination on Islamic Religious knowledge on that day, Oluwasesin was responsible for ensuring that students strictly kept rules and to prevent mischief in the hall, which had become common among cheating students, said Aluke Musa Yila, a fellow teacher at the school.
Musa told Compass that Oluwasesin had collected papers, books and bags before the exam in the all-girls class, in accordance with school procedures to prevent cheating, and dropped the materials in front of the class.
While noting that Oluwasesin was not aware the belongings included a Quran, a local newspaper reported she tossed the belongings outside the classroom. But Musa, who rushed into the classroom soon after students began yelling, told Compass that Oluwasesin had dropped the belongings in front of the class.
“Usually such items are returned to every student as each returns her answer script,” Musa said. “Soon after the bags collected by Oluwasesin were dropped in front of the class, one of the girls in the class began to cry. She told her colleagues that she had a copy of the Quran in her bag, that Oluwasesin touched the bag, and that by doing so she had desecrated the Quran, since she was a Christian.”
Soon after the student raised this alarm, other students in class began to shout “Allahu Akbar [God is great].”
“It was at this point that I was attracted to the riotous scene in that class, and I then rushed there,” said Musa, who said he witnessed the murder of Oluwasesin by the Muslim students and extremists. “How could a teacher know that that there was a copy of the Quran in a student’s bag if this was not pointed out to her?”
He notified Malam Baba Musa, patron of the Muslim Students’ Society at the school. The MSS patron, along with three other school staff members, went to the classroom to try to bring calm, Aluke Musa said. In the raucous confusion, he managed to rush Oluwasesin out of class to the principal’s office.
“The principal left me and Oluwasesin in his office and also went there to calm down the Muslim students,” he said. “Knowing that the students may soon come to this office, I pushed Oluwasesin into the bathroom in this office and then locked up the office.”
By the time he had rejoined the principal and other staff members, he said, the entire school was engulfed in uproar. Muslim extremists from outside the school rushed in to join in the unrest.
“They destroyed school property and were demanding that Oluwasesin must be given to them to be stoned to death,” Musa said. “When we could not give in by releasing Oluwasesin to them, they started stoning us.”
Pandemonium prevented school or law enforcement officials from getting Oluwasesin out of the school, he said.
