Nigerian Muslim Family Forces Atheist Son Into Mental Ward
Source: theepochtimes.com
LAGOS, Nigeria—A staunchly Muslim family in northern Nigeria has forced their son into a mental hospital for declaring himself an atheist, according to a lawyer and supporters who have started an online campaign to #FreeMubarak.Chemical engineer Mubarak Bala, 29, alerted people to his plight with tweets allegedly from a smuggled phone that he used in the toilet of Kano city’s Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, where he says he is being drugged and held against his will in a psychiatric ward.
In his tweets, Bala said on Friday his father and three uncles beat him up and his brother injected him with a sedative. He woke up 30 hours later in the hospital.
“My neck still hurts from the stranglehold of my father, and the beat(ing) of uncles dislocated my finger and arm,” he said in one message.
Lawyer Muhammad Bello Shehu said Bala’s father told him he committed his son for his own safety.
“He said that the reason he had to take him to the hospital is for his own security because once people got glimpse that he is denouncing the existence of God … he could be lynched and the house set on fire,” Shehu said.
Bala said that while he was sedated his family used his phone to post on Facebook that he had returned to the Muslim faith. He described his father as an Islamic leader who “can’t afford to have a non-Muslim family member, so he declared me insane.”
The father, Muhammad Bala, could not immediately be reached for comment. In a blog, the father describes himself as a journalist and director general of Kano state’s Directorate of Societal Reorientation, one of the bodies that enforces Islamic Shariah law.
Lawyer Shehu said the son told him at a meeting in the hospital Wednesday that he “just wants to get out of there.”
[...]
Read the full article at: theepochtimes.com
Sudanese Christian Woman Sentenced to Death for Apostasy
Alicia Gali’s Horror Story - How Women are Treated under Sharia Law in "The New" Middle East
