A Nigerian Sharia court postponed the appeal of a man...

A Nigerian Sharia court postponed the appeal of a man who has been sentenced to death by stoning until after the season for Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca, the Hajj, which runs from 10-13 February.
Sarimu Mohammed Baranda, a 54-year-old said by his family to be mentally ill, was convicted of raping a nine-year-old child in May 2002 and sentenced to death under northern Nigeria's controversial Islamic law code.
He is thought to be the first man to be sentenced to death by stoning in the three years since 12 Muslim-majority states began to reintroduce Sharia law despite fierce opposition from Nigerian Christians.
"This case is adjourned until after the Hajj, when a date will be fixed because we don't know when we will return," Judge Isa Inuwa told the appeal court in Dutse, capital of the rural state of Jigawa.
Baranda initially confessed to the rape, but his lawyer persuaded the court to allow an appeal on the grounds that the accused was mentally unfit.
Northern Nigeria, which is home to 40 million mainly Muslim people, began in reintroduce Sharia law after President Olusegun Obasanjo's 1999 election brought to an end 15 years of military rule.
The law's return -- it had been in use throughout the period of British colonial rule until Nigeria's independence in 1962 -- provoked bloody riots between Muslims and the region's Christian minority.
International rights groups and some governments have also reacted angrily to the return of punishments such as amputation, flogging and stoning. Obasanjo has said that while he opposes stoning he will not intervene to prevent the states imposing their own laws.
He has said that he expects those sentenced to be stoned to be reprieved if and when their appeal process brings them before a federal court.