The long ordeal of six petty thieves locked up in a mud-brick Nigerian jail waiting for their hands to be chopped off has revived a simmering controversy over the reintroduction of Islamic Sharia law.
Convicted just over a year ago, the six men from the northern state of Kaduna have since been languishing in a colonial-era prison in the ancient city of Zaria, waiting for the authorities to decide their fate.
"Although it is frightening to have one's wrist amputated, I sometimes wish the sentence had been carried out, to end all the anxiety," 36-year-old Aminu Haruna, who admits to having stolen a motorbike, told AFP this week.
"It has not been easy living within these four walls with such a sentence hanging over me," he said, in an interview carried out in the prison superintendent's office in the presence of the state governor's legal adviser.
The men, dubbed the "Zaria Six" by local human rights campaigners, appear to have fallen into a legal and political black hole.
A decision over their eventual punishment will mark an important stage in northern Nigeria's long debate over the implementation of Sharia law, along with its tough range of punishments; stoning, flogging and amputation.
While the governments of Kaduna and 11 other mainly-Muslim northern states have all, in theory, incorporated a version of Sharia into their criminal codes, amputations have been very rare and no stoning has yet taken place.
Meanwhile, the region's powerful state governors have found themselves caught in the middle of a bitter debate.
On the one hand an outspoken group of radical Islamic clerics, supported by many in a population sickened by corruption and hungry for the rule of law, are demanding the imposition of "true Sharia", with the bloodshed that implies.
In the other camp, Nigeria's federal government, human rights groups and the north's Christian minority are fearful that this could increase violent local tensions and further darken the country's terrible international image.
"These convicts have been in prison since last year. We feel their one year stay in prison is enough punishment for the crimes they were convicted for," said Shehu Sani, head of a Kaduna pressure group, the Civil Rights Congress.
"Having lived on remand for one year in constant fear of the possibility of losing a wrist at any moment is enough torment to serve as expiation for the crimes they were charged with and convicted for," he told AFP.
Among the six, motorcycle thief Haruna - who has two wives and eight young children to support - is guilty of the most serious crime. Aminu Shehu, 25, took a bag of maize; Bashir Ahmed, 28, cloth worth 3,000 naira (22 dollars/18 euros). Rabi'u Turunku, 25, and Ahmed Usman, 21, worked together to rustle a cow and Mustapha Hamza, 33, shoplifted some food.
Sani's group has taken up the Zaria Six's case, launching an appeal on their behalf and striving to attract the interest of the international community.
Meanwhile, not wanting to take responsibility for cutting the thieves' hands off themselves, worried prison officials have brought the matter to the attention of Kaduna's Governor Ahmed Makarfi. "Before now, the governor didn't know of these convictions because he was never briefed on anything like this," said Makarfi's legal advisor Ibrahim Umar, who travelled to Zaria jail with an AFP reporter to investigate the case. "The letter from the prison never reached the governor, it must have been channelled wrongly," he explained.
Having met the convicts - who were all convicted in August and September last year at the Upper Sharia Court in the rural town of Tudun Wada - he raised the possibility that they could still be cleared.
"Although their one month grace for appeal has long expired the government would still have no objection if they decide to appeal," Umar said.
"They have three chances: from Sharia court of appeal to the court of appeal and then to the supreme court," he explained.
The promise of a lengthy appeal, ending one day in a federal court not in principle bound by Islamic law, has long been the response of Nigerian officials nervous about allowing a Sharia case to reach its logical conclusion.
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