Abdullahi Sale, a trader, was given a life sentence by the Lagos State Special Offenses Court in Ikeja for kidnapping and defiling his 13-year-old neighbor (name withheld).
According to Channels TV, Sale was found guilty on two counts of defilement and kidnapping by the state government, and Justice Rahman Oshodi delivered the verdict.
Sections 137 and 268 of the Lagos State Criminal Law, 2015 were violated, the prosecution had told the judge.
The state legislature’s intention to treat such offenses with the maximum severity is shown in Section 137, which stipulates life in prison for child defilement.
The inmate, who lived in a “face-me-I-face-you” home at 18 Agunbiade Street, Kirikiri Town, Apapa, was charged with luring the JSS1 student into his room, defiling her, and keeping her there for eleven days.
According to the survivor’s mother’s testimony, her daughter vanished after they got back from church. During this time, Sale allegedly came to ask about the girl several times while keeping her locked in his room within the same complex while feigning care.
She said that after a naval officer discovered the child sitting by herself on the street, he took her to the police station. The girl then led detectives to Sale’s chamber, where she disclosed that he had imprisoned her, given her instant noodles, and provided her with pee and excrement containers.
When the 14-year-old survivor testified in November 2022, she said she had never been in Sale’s room before to the incident. She explained that after entering, she was imprisoned for around a week in a dark room.
As the third prosecution witness, Nwoke Okoi Oluchi, a nurse and midwife, gave a medical report from the Women at Risk International Foundation (WARIF) Center in Yaba.
Significant vaginal discharge, bruises, healed lacerations, and an intact hymen were all noted in the report. It noted that the girl had been sexually attacked twice while imprisoned in Sale’s chamber and came to the conclusion that these results were consistent with forced vaginal penetration.
In his own testimony, the convicted man refuted the accusations, stating the girl had contacted him for N15,000 to get an abortion, first claiming it was for a friend, and then confessing she was expecting a child for a barber called Samuel.
According to Justice Oshodi’s ruling, the convict’s testimony was “wholly incredible,” improbable, internally contradictory, and at odds with established facts.
The judge determined that the girl was a minor under the minor Rights Law as the prosecution had demonstrated that she was 13 at the time.
A kid cannot legally consent to being detained for sexual purposes, he added, and she was held in the defendant’s chamber for eleven days.
“The circumstances, taken together with the medical evidence of vaginal penetration, permit only one rational conclusion: the defendant engaged in sexual intercourse with the prosecutrix during her confinement,” the court ruled.
Justice Oshodi went on to characterize the offenses as “grievous,” highlighting how Sale had abused his neighbor’s confidence and exacerbated the family’s suffering by detaining the girl in his room and sexually abusing her while feigning assistance in the search.
He said that the legislature’s intention to treat such offenses with the utmost severity is reflected in section 137 of the Lagos State Criminal Law, which stipulates life in prison for child defilement.
“Abdullahi Sale, I sentence you to life imprisonment on count one for the offense of defilement in violation of section 137 of the Criminal Law,” the judge said. I give you a seven-year prison term for the second count, which is abduction in violation of section 268 of the same statute.
The second count’s sentence will begin on September 17, 2021, the day you were remanded in jail. You will serve both terms simultaneously, which is a life sentence in jail.
Judge Oshodi said, “I order that your name be entered into the Sex Offenders Register in accordance with sections 33 and 38 of the Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency Law, 2021, as the prosecution urged me during sentencing.”
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