Tobias Sylvester
Seven self-confessed ‘witches’ have been dragged before a court in Yola, Adamawa state capital, over the failing health of a 3-year-old girl.
The suspects includes a 60-year-old woman identified as Halima Jonta, one other woman still at large identified simply as Dudu, and five other minors.
The 60-year-old and the minors were rounded up and brought to the Criminal Area Court 1, Yola, by a community leader and Sarkin Mayu Adamawa, Kabiru Garba after learnt that they allegedly used demonic powers to afflict the three-year-old girl with an illness.
During the trial, Halima revealed that she and the five minors aged between four and six years, as well as a woman on the run, had bewitched the three-year-old girl.
She also disclosed that she and two other women had killed seven people in the seven years she had been in witchcraft practice.
The kids, who also confessed in court, said Halima and the other woman now at large asked them to tie the three-year-old and put a stone in her stomach, adding that the soul of a dead person was planted in the little girl.
‘With the soul of the dead in her, she can’t live a normal life,” they asserted.
The kids said they had untied her and removed the stone in her, but the death image in her remained because removing it was beyond their power and only Dudu who is on the run can remove it because she planted it.
The Criminal Area Court 1 judge, Hon Umar Gangs who ruled on the case expressed anger that little children still so far from adulthood were introduced into witchcraft.
He ordered that Dudu should be found by all means and brought before the court and he gave the accused a 24-hour ultimatum to remove all that they had inflicted the three-old-girl with and restore her to perfect health.
KanyiDaily recalls that a Witches Group had recently hailed the government for closing down evangelical church over ‘healing powers’.
