By Mary BASSEY, Senior Investigator Reporter, Lagos.
ONE of the ugly legacies of teenage marriages predominantly practiced in Northern Nigeria was brought to the fore recently by a 17 year old housewife who allegedly stabbed her husband to death while he was forcefully attempting to have sex with her. In her innocence, the visibly distraught girl told Police detectives that she does not have the slightest idea that when a woman is married to a man, she would have to submit herself for sex.
*The knife used to kill her husband…
Shocked and confused altogether, the teenager, Salma Hassan who was spotted at the Itas-Gadua Divisional Bauchi, insisted that she thought her husband was trying to defile her stressing that her mother never told her that sex was part of marital obligation. CrimeWorld scooped that, that ill-fated Tuesday May 19, 2020 which marked their 11 days in marriage, the late husband, Mohammed Mustapha, had called her into his room at their Itas-Gadua home so he could have carnal knowledge of her adding that she kicked; and that resulted in beating. In the ensued struggle to stop the pummeling and freed herself, she grabbed a kitchen knife and thrusts it into her husband’s chest. According to her, reaching for the knife was merely to scare her husband and prevent further beating; maintaining that she couldn’t say with exactitude how the knife pierced her man. Lamenting her action a sobbing Salma muttered, “Yes we were married and we loved each other. I never knew that sex is a marital obligation; nobody told me so. On that fateful night when he approached me for sex, I refused him because I hadn’t done it before. I thought he wanted to defile me. So he got angry and was trying to force himself into me with slaps and beating, then I picked up a knife to scare him away but he kept coming. I didn’t know when I stabbed him with the knife in his chest. I have already given my statement. I am in great suffering and great bitterness. I don’t know what will happen to me now. But I wouldn’t have done what I did if I had been educated on marriage and sex.”
A senior Police source who whispered to us on the ground that he was not competent to address the press said the knife used for the crime had been recovered adding that Salma would be transferred to the Homicide section of the Command for culpable homicide. According to the source, “On the April 24, 2020 at about 0900hrs, one Haruna Musa of Itas-Gadau reported at Itas-Gadau Division, that one Salma Hassan, 17 years of the same address stabbed her husband, one Mohammed Mustapha on the chest. As a result, he sustained serious injury and was rushed to General hospital Itas–Gadau for treatment where he was certified dead. The suspect was arrested and has confessed to the crime. Exhibit recovered from the suspect was one knife used to commit the crime
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