Nigeria: "Marriage" on Facebook triggers death threats in Kano

Four men from the northern Nigerian town of Kano have received death threats for organizing a mock marriage on Facebook deemed offensive to Islam.

The groom, Sanusi Abdullahi, confessed to "joking" a Facebook friend of $ 56 (£ 44) during his "online wedding".

Religious leaders said it was a travesty of the institution of marriage.

Kano is one of the 12 northern states where Islamic law, or Sharia law, is applied and enforced by the religious police.

Mr Abdullahi, 29, told the BBC that the messages he had exchanged with a Facebook friend about a wedding were joking.

His other friends, who are part of the same group, then joined the conversation – one claimed to give the wife, the other two acted as "witnesses" of the marriage.

The story quickly spread to Facebook and was picked up by the local media, which led to the condemnation by religious leaders who called for their arrest.

Sheik Nazifi Inuwa, a prominent religious leader in Kano, told the BBC that the incident was un-Islamic.

"In Islam, only lost ladies marry without their parents or guardians delivering it to their suitor.What Sanusi and his friends have done is only a useless charade … Islamic marriage never happens that way. "

Mr. Abdullahi and his three friends decided to hide after starting to receive death threats by SMS.

He was attacked by a stranger on Monday, an incident that decided him, with his friends, to go out of hiding and to report to Hisbah. [religious police] apologize for the mock marriage.

Abba Sufi, the head of Hisbah in Kano, told the BBC that he had accepted the apology of these men and warned them not to do it anymore.

"I was scared after being attacked but the police badured me that she would investigate this incident.I am also grateful that it has been two days and that I have not received threat, "Abdullahi told the BBC.

The woman involved in the incident lives in the state of Borno, in the north-east of the country, without being sanctioned, but her boyfriend left her because of the incident .

Mr. Abdullahi also told the BBC that his fiancée had left him.