Hanifa: Court Fixes July 28 For Judgment

A Kano state high Court sitting at Audu Bako has fixed July 28 for judgment in the murder case of five-year-old Hanifa Abubakar.

She was allegedly killed by her school proprietor, Abdulmalik Tanko.

The judge, Justice Usman Na’abba, fixed the date on Tuesday after adoption of final written addresses by parties.

The trio of Abdulmalik alongside his accomplice, Hashim Isyaku and Fatima Jibril Musa, were arraigned before the Kano State High court on five count charges bordering on criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, confinement, and culpable homicide contrary to sections 97, 274, 277, 221 of the penal code.

At the resumed hearing on Tuesday, the prosecution led by Lamido Abba Soron Dinki, urged the court to consider the totality of the evidence tendered before it to find the defendants guilty of the charges leveled against them and sentence them to death.

“We urge the court to pass death sentence on all the defendants because the punishment of those sections under which they are all charged carried the same punishment of death penalty,” he prayed.

Hanifa was abducted on December 4, 2021, on her way home from Islamiyya School and subsequently discovered to have been killed.

Earlier, Tanko confessed to kidnapping and killing the victim with N100 rat poison before burying her in a shallow grave in one of his schools but he recanted later, admitting only to the kidnapping her.