Safiyah Husseini Tungar Tudu, the young lady sentenced to death for adultery by a Sokoto Sharia court in 2001 has died after a protracted illness.
According to her son in-law, Sanusi, Safiya died after a long battle with blindness and illness. Sanusi is the husband of her daughter Adama whose pregnancy led to the accusation and consequent death sentence more than two decades ago.
“She had lost her sight for some time before she fell ill. It was what we were battling with before she fell ill. The illness cost us a lot of money as a family. We were going in and out of hospital for many months. There was no help from anywhere. As a family, we had to contribute money to take to the hospital.
“We travelled to as far as Sokoto to get treatment for her. Whenever she gets better, we would bring her back home, only for the sickness to relapse until she died,” Sanusi said.
Sanusi disclosed that Safiyah died earlier this year. “She died earlier this year. That was before this year’s Muslim fasting month, during the elders’ fasting which is a prelude to the fasting month.”
Her death became known when a crew from Brazil’s TV Globo, Latin America’s biggest television station, came to Nigeria to do a follow up documentary on her. The advance party got to her house, in Tungar Tudu in Gwadabawa council area of Sokoto, but met the doors shut. The villagers explained that Safiya had died many months ago. They called her son in-law Sanusi who then explained when and how she died.
In her last media interview with The Nation newspapers, published on March 28, 2020, 18 years after she was freed by the Sokoto Court of Appeal, Safiya had lamented how she was used and abandoned by the organizations thatpromised to help her during her fight for her life.
She had lamented: “None! I don’t see anybody now. It is only me and my children.” She had also expressed sadness that what she got from individuals of goodwill from different parts of the world had been denied her.
It would be recalled that Safiya Husseni Tungar Tudu was convicted of adultery by a Sokoto Sharia Court and sentenced to death by stoning in 2001, leading to outrage from across the world. She got a reprieve on March 25, 2002 when a Sokoto Appeal Court squashed the death sentence and acquited her of all the charges.
