What started as a house-to-house search for the whereabouts of six-year-old Aisha Ya’u in the densely populated Kurmin Mashi community of Kaduna South Local Government Area of Kaduna State, came to a tragic end five hours later, when her lifeless body was found near a cemetery.
Confusion and despair engulfed the community on the evening of Sunday, November 8, 2020, when Aisha’s remains, partly covered in sand, were brought to her home. Still clad in her cream coloured T-Shirt with light blue stripes, a yellow and red patterned ankara skirt and her orange coloured hijab, an eye witness said the little girl had been discovered lying sideways by a hidden corner near the cemetery.
According to Aisha’s mother, Amarat Dahiru, what could have been an ordinary Sunday turned tragic when she noticed that her six-year-old daughter had not joined her siblings to get ready for her Islamiyya classes. The 30-year-old mother of four said she had spent almost an hour at her mother in-law’s home a few meters from her home and when she noticed it was past noon, she had returned home to feed the children and get them ready for their Islamic classes.
“Before then, Aisha and the other children had returned home around 11am after the morning Islamiyya session. She changed into a T-shirt and Ankara skirt and then wore her hijab and stepped out to play with friends, that was when I went to see her grandmother,” Amarat told Daily Trust Saturday.
But sometime after 12 noon, Amarat noticed Aisha was not back to prepare for Islamiyya and so she asked her co-wife whom the little girl sometimes stayed with but was told Aisha was not in her custody. Bemused, Amarat asked other children about the whereabouts of Aisha and sent them out to find her among relatives living nearby, but no one had seen her daughter. “I then went to her grandmother’s house and they said they had not seen her and someone suggested that perhaps she had gone to the Islamiyya. I sent her siblings, then went there myself but she wasn’t there.”
As minutes turned to an hour without Aisha, a search party was launched with friends and relatives volunteering to search for the little girl. From house-to-house, the search soon expanded to the home of community leaders, vigilante group and a formal report was made at the police station.
Aisha’s grandmother, Rukkaiya, said the six-year-old usually visits her after Islamiyya but did not see her on that fateful day. “We went to Sarki’s house (village head), Vigilante and Police and then later, someone came to inform us that the corpse of a little girl had been discovered near the cemetery. My heart sank, I told them to just tell me that she was dead and a few minutes later one of my grandsons came back to confirm it,” a distraught Malama Rukaiyya told our correspondent.
Before Sunday’s tragic incident, on June 28, 2020, the remains of another six-year-old girl, Khadija Ya’u, had been found in a mosque in the same Kurmin Mashi having gone missing around 12.30pm. Khadija’s home is less than a kilometer from Aisha’s home and the report of her medical examination had shown that the young girl had been raped before she was killed. Though the incident sparked outrage and fear in the community, no one had been arrested in connection to the crime.
Like Khadija, Aisha’s medical report from the post-mortem examination shows that the six-year-old had been sexually assaulted before she was killed. According to the Kaduna State Commissioner of Human Services and Social Development, Hajiya Hafsat Mohammed Baba, the medical report shows that Aisha had died from a fatal blow to the head. Baba, while speaking with Daily Trust Saturday correspondent said the six-year-old had been sexually assaulted by penetration using her assailant’s finger, but the cause of death was an injury in the head.
This was corroborated by the Kaduna State Police Command through the Public Relations officer, ASP Mohammed Jalige, who said the little girl had been raped before she was gruesomely killed. “She was hit with a hard object on her forehead. We are taking this matter seriously, the police have since commenced investigation especially since this has happened before,” he said.
Two murders within the span of five months is enough to traumatize any community especially one in which children, as young as two, are often sent out to play or asked to run errands unsupervised. Kurmin Mashi, being one of such communities have now been thrown into prayer-mode, hoping a divine intervention would expose the sexual predator suspected to be living among residents.
The village head of Sabon Layi- Kurmin Mashi, Sarki Abdullahi Rabo Chiroma, told our correspondent that parents have been admonished against sending their children on errands unsupervised while school teachers have been warned against sending pupils back home unaccompanied.
“We are very upset about the situation; this is the second time such ugly incident is happening here and we must do something about it. We cannot continue to remain nonchalant about the happenings around us. Neighbours must watch out for their neighbours, so that we can get to the root of this matter,” he said.
The community leader also shared the fears of many in the community who told our correspondent that the age and circumstance of death of the two girls was more than a coincidence and may be ritualistic in nature.
Daily Trust Saturday reports that Khadija and Aisha – the two victims, share the same surname even though their parents are not related. Among the eerie commonalities the two victims shared are their age, circumstance of death and proximity of the family homes.
Aisha’s dad, Ya’u Ibrahim, said he knows Khadija’s dad as they only live a few houses away from each other, adding that he never imagined a similar fate with befall his family.
Hajiya Hafsat Baba also suspects the rapist and murderer may be living among the people when she said: “The rapist is in our community and the question is, what are we going to do about it? That is my problem now.” She charged the police to deploy all the necessary resources to apprehend the perpetrators, expressing worry that unless checked, such heinous crime could repeatedly occur.
Aisha’s father, Ya’u Ibrahim, who was in Abuja at the time of the incident, called on parents to be more vigilant and expressed concern that the culprit could be bold enough to repeat such a crime within a span of five months. “There is so much fear in the community now,” he told our correspondent. “We fear that this person may be here, living among us. It happened before and no one was arrested, now it has happened again and as at now, there is still no lead and no one has been arrested, it worries me a lot,” he said.
