A senior Hisbah officer, Sani Rimo, who was recently arrested by the Kano state police command on allegations of being in a hotel with a married man has been exonerated after it was discovered that the said woman was actually his daughter and not a married woman.
His arrest was made public after it was reported on Freedom Radio Kano on Tuesday, Feb 16 that he had been arrested in the Sabon Gari area of the city. Read here.
Shortly after it became public, Kano’s Hisbah Commander, Muhammed Haruna, ordered a two-man committee to investigate the matter.
In an interview with SaharaReporters on Wednesday, March 10. the Hisbah’s communications officer, Nabahani Usman, said the matter had been fully investigated by the police, and the officer was found innocent. According to him, the said married woman in question is Rimo’s daughter.
He said the woman had some issues with her husband’s family and was lodged in a hotel by her husband’s family pending the time the case would be resolved. Usman said Rimo had gone to give his daughter some food at the hotel located in Sabon Gari when people sighted him and thought he was visiting his lover.
“The latest update on the case is that it was transferred to the police, fully investigated by the police and the outcome of their investigation is that the man is innocent of all the charges; the allegations were false. The lady is a daughter to him, there is a marital issue between the woman and her husband’s family so they had to lodge her in a hotel pending the time they would resolve the matter.
They didn’t even allow her family to reach out to her but her father got to know about it and was taking food to her in the hotel. When people saw that a Hisbah official was going to the hotel, they started shouting that a Hisbah officer had gone to meet a married woman in the hotel and all that, without even knowing she is his daughter.
The man right now is devastated, he has filed a petition against Freedom Radio through his solicitors. They will have to pay N10 million in damages and he said they would have to retract the publication and offer a public apology to him. He might go after other media houses though but we are not sure yet.”
Established to enforce the Sharia law, Hisbah officers regularly arrest unmarried people caught in hotels, presumably for sexual activities, as part of their enforcement of the Sharia.
