July 2001 Africa News Headlines

KANO - A 13-year-old girl has been arrested in northeast Nigeria over the ritual-linked killings of 51 people, including her father, police said on Friday.

Jummai Hassan, a pupil at an army college, was arrested on July 17 in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, over the disappearance of a two-year-old boy, Borno State Police Commissioner Bello Uba Ringim told a radio station monitored here.

The girl would be charged soon with multiple murders, the police chief added, without providing details.

The girl, detained in Maiduguri, also spoke to the state-run Radio Kaduna and admitted a role in some killings, saying she was a member of a cult led by one 'Emmanuel'."

"He is our initiator. We do what he says," she said, speaking in the Hausa language used across northern Nigeria.

Belief in witchcraft and the spirit world is widespread in Nigeria.

The girl told the radio she had travelled by "spirit" means from Maiduguri, in the far northeast, to the southwestern city of Lagos to attend nighttime cult meetings, all without her parents' knowing."

"My body is here but my spirit is away. We go by our spirits but interact as normal human beings," she said.

"We attend meetings at a church in Lagos at night where instructions are given to us as to which parts of the human body to take," the girl went on.

"We always use a powder to kill. Once we apply it on a person, he dies and we take away his heart," she said.

She said she had killed her father because he was an "obstruction", stopping her from taking the life of her grandmother.

Interviewed, an unnamed police officer said that the day after her arrest, the girl was found lying in her cell, apparently in a trance."

"On entering the cell, we found her lying face-down with no sign of life in her... After some time, she recovered and told us she had been to a meeting of her cult in Lagos," he said.

The police chief, in the course of the same interview, said that in the course of investigations the girl had confessed to killing the boy and 50 other people and would soon be formally charged. - Nampa-Sapa-AFP