By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
Message of solidarity has come the way of the beleaguered 13-year-old boy, Omar Farouq, who was handed a 10-year jail sentence for blasphemy by a Sharia Court from far away Poland.
A human rights activist and head of Poland’s Auschwitz Memorial, Piotr Cywinski, on Friday wrote to President Muhammadu Buhari, pleading that the teenager should be pardoned.
Farouq was accused of making blasphemous statements during an argument and was consequently sentenced by a Sharia Court in Kano State last month.
But Cywinski said that if a pardon was not possible, he and 119 other volunteers would take on the boy’s punishment so that each of them would spend one month in a Nigerian jail.
In the letter to President Muhammadu Buhari which was sent to TheNiche via WhatSapp on Saturday by a concerned citizen, Cywinski said as the director of a memorial to a place “where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity.”
Although the sentence has been widely condemned by rights groups, the Presidency is yet to comment on it.
UNICEF said last month that the sentence was “wrong” and against the international accords that Nigeria had signed.
Below is the letter: