When Amina Lawal gave birth to a big-eyed baby girl late last year, she hoped her life was getting better. After leaving her second husband, she had started dating Yahaya Mohammed, a good-looking neighbor with a steady job. When she became pregnant, Mohammed said at first that he didn't want children. But a chief in the couple's mud-walled village of Kurami ruled that Mohammed must take responsibility for his child, and the reluctant father gave Lawal money to buy firewood to boil water during the delivery. Lawal says Mohammed also agreed to marry her. "I thought that this would end up as a happy thing," she says. But eight days after she gave birth, police arrested Lawal, 30, for adultery, a capital crime under the Islamic law, or shari'a, in effect in her home state of Katsina in northern Nigeria. A courtroom crowd cried, "Allahu akbar (God is great)!" as a shari'a court last week rejected an appeal of her sentence. As soon as she weans nine-month-old Wasila, Lawal is scheduled to be buried in the ground up to her chest and stoned to death.
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