Members of the Islamic Movement, under the leadership of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky have called on the federal and state governments to release their members currently in Nigerian Correctional Centres.
They claimed that they secured an important victory over the matter when on July 24, 2020, the Kaduna State High Court presided over by Justice M.L. Mohammed discharged 12 members who were alleged to have committed criminal offences.
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“The arrests and subsequent charges followed a declaration by the Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai that the Islamic Movement in Nigeria is proscribed as an unlawful society in October, 2016, even though he had no legal Authority to do so,” they said.
According to Usman Mohammed who spoke to journalists in Kaduna, “The movement not being a formally structured registered organization, but rather a religious movement, does not fall in the category of society as wrongly described by the governor to satisfy some whims and caprices contrary to the interest of the state.”
El Zakzaky is the head of Nigeria’s Islamic Movement, a movement that he founded in the late 1970s, when he was a student at Ahmadu Bello University, and began propagating Shia Islam around 1979.
In December 2015, the Nigerian Army raided his residence in Zaria, seriously injured him, and killed hundreds of his followers; since then, he has remained under state detention.
In 2019, a court in Kaduna state granted him and his wife bail to seek treatment abroad but they returned from India after 3 days on the premises of unfair treatment and tough restrictions by security operatives deployed to the medical facility
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