Post date: Feb 03, 2013 3:27:26 PM
Two Malian men accused of being Gay describe how they were saved from a bloody Sharia execution when French forces drove Islamist Jihadists from the city of Gao.
GAO, MALI (FEBRUARY 1, 2013)(REUTERS) - Two men in the Malian town of Gao were saved from execution on Saturday, January 26 when French and Malian forces drove out Islamic jihadists who had been controlling the town for the past ten months.
Badou Ahmed and Alitiin Ag Oussman had been sentenced to death by a Sharia court in the town for homosexuality. Both men deny being gay.One of the men, Ahmed said that he was arrested by Islamic police and beaten unconscious suffering severe injuries and now walks with a limp.
"When they brought me to the Islamic Police, they told that my friend admitted that we are gay, they put me in a room and beat me until I lost consciousness. When I woke up I realized I had a fractured hip," Ahmed said.
He went on to say that at the trial itself they were not allowed any witnesses, and despite one man saying they should be given a second chance the pair were convicted and sentenced to a bloody execution.
"During the trial, there were no defence witnesses, it was controlled, and they told us they were going to cut our throats for being homosexual. Even though another man said that without witness testimony, we should not be condemned,"
Ahmed said.
Alitiin Ag Oussman showed a Reuters journalist where he had been detained, saying that while he languished in his bare cell awaiting his fate he heard the sound of bombing, and then a crowd came and rescued him.
"I was in prison and I was waiting to be executed the next day when I heard bombing throughout the night." he said, "In the morning a crowd arrived, breaking my cell door to get out, they told me they that I was free, the city is liberated from Islamists."
As she looked after her younger children, Oussman's mother Agueychatou Waletexplained that the Sharia court had asked her to witness her son's execution.
"Abdoul Hakim called us to say that they had decided to slit the throat of our son on Saturday, so to come and help. We told him we would not help with that, but after he was executed to tell us so that we could bury him," she said.
For the past ten months Islamic Jihadists controlled northern Mali, practising strict Sharia law and carrying out bloody punishment on Mali's mainly black Africans, amputating limbs and executing people for crimes like adultery, by stoning, often without trial or evidence.
French military forces with the Malian government army have launched an attack on the Islamic held north and have succeeded in driving out the sharia-observing radical Islamist occupiers from many strategic towns like Gao and Timbuku.