FOR 18 months Amina Lawal has lived with the prospect of being buried up to her neck in sand and stoned to death. Yesterday, after a huge international campaign to save her, she was spared.

By four votes to one, a Nigerian appeals court overturned the divorcée’s conviction under Sharia for having a child out of wedlock. Her head covered in a light orange veil, she was hustled away from the courtroom clutching her two-year-old daughter.

“It is a victory for womanhood and humanity,” declared Hauwa Ibrahim, her lawyer.

“Amina is free. Amina has been discharged. Amina can have her life back.”

Across the West, governments and human rights groups expressed relief and delight. Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, said: “It was an outrage that Amina Lawal should ever have faced the unbelievably cruel punishment of death by stoning for any offence — never mind the supposed offence of adultery.”

Mrs Lawal, 32, was to have been the first person stoned to death since Sharia was introduced in the predominantly Muslim states of northern Nigeria in 1999, and the first in modern times.

Two unmarried lovers have also been sentenced to death by stoning and, even as Mrs Lawal was freed, a Sharia court in the northern state of Bauchi was yesterday sentencing Jibrin Babaji, 20, to death by stoning after he confessed to sexually molesting minors. Each of the boys assaulted by Babaji are to be publicly flogged for accepting money from him in exchange for sexual favours.

Elsewhere in northern Nigeria, one man has been hanged for killing a woman and her two children, three people have had hands amputated for theft, and a dozen more are awaiting provincial governors to sign papers before their hands are cut off.

Mrs Lawal, like thousands of other women in northern Nigeria, was married before puberty. Her husband later abandoned her and she returned to live with her father in the remote farming village of Kurami. There, she told The Times in an interview last year, she was raped by a man that she believed was her friend.

She became pregnant. Villagers denounced her to the Islamic authorities and she was convicted of adultery in March last year. Her case became a cause célèbre after she lost her first appeal.

Islamic prosecutors insisted that her daughter, Wasila, born more than two years after her divorce and six months after Katsina province introduced Sharia, was all the proof they needed of her adultery.

No charges were brought against the child’s father because of lack of evidence.

Scores of Western governments, led by the European Union, called on President Obasanjo of Nigeria to intervene directly to save the young woman from what was denounced as a barbaric punishment.

The sentence was also a severe embarrassment to Nigeria’s secular authorities, who have been struggling to overhaul the country’s poor human rights record under years of military rule. President Obasanjo, a Christian, found himself in the awkward position of trying to appease human rights activists without alienating the Muslims who make up 50 per cent of Nigeria’s 130 million population.

The ruling would have come as a great relief to him as well. After the hour-long hearing. Judge Ibrahim Mai-Unguwa said: “It is the view of this court that the judgment of the Upper Sharia Court was very wrong, and the appeal of Amina Lawal is hereby discharged.”

Mrs Lawal had not been caught in the act of adultery, and had not been given ample opportunity to defend herself, a spokesman said.

Mrs Lawal, like Safiya Hussani, the first woman to have her sentence of death by stoning overturned by an appeals court, is now expected to return to her father’s village and her precarious subsistence existence.

Her lawyer added: “This is a victory for the law. It’s a victory for justice, and it’s a victory for what we stand for — dignity and fundamental human rights. Today we are celebrating the victory of law over the rule of man.”

Few observers expect that the acquittal will lead to a reduction in tensions between Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims.

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