The Police has apprehended a serial rapist who was caught in a child’s bedroom after carrying out 40 sex attacks in 12 months.
The 32-year-old Muhammad Alfa was arrested in Kwanar Dangora, on the outskirts of Kano in north west Nigeria on Tuesday.
Officers say he confessed to having raped more than 40 women in a year, including girls as young as 10, married women, and an 80-year-old woman.
It comes as Nigeria’s Minister of Women’s Affairs called on law enforcement to speed up rape investigations after an ‘alarming’ spike in cases during the country’s coronavirus lockdown.
The Kano State Police Command’s public relations officer, DSP Abdullahi Haruna, said the suspect was apprehended after a mother, from the northern town of Dangora, caught the man in her child’s bedroom.
The man ran away but neighbours chased him and caught him.
Haruna added that the community was happy after receiving the news that the serial rapist had been arrested by the police.
The chief of the town, Ahmadu Yau, also said the arrest was a welcome development, after residents told how they have been living in fear for the last year after hearing about a series of rapes.
‘We can now sleep with our eyes closed,’ one woman told the BBC.
Nigeria’s Minister of Women’s Affairs Pauline Tallen said at a government meeting on Wednesday: ‘There has been an outcry against the rape epidemic because of the lockdown.’
She said that rape cases had recently increased by a factor of three, because ‘women and children are locked down with their abusers’.
All 36 states in Nigeria were affected, Ms Tallen said.
Dangora is a small town in Kano state about 85 kilometres south-west of Kano city, making it difficult for police to access.
There has been a recent wave of rapes and killing of women in Nigeria, which have led to a national outcry, with thousands signing a petition and using the hashtag #WeAreTired.
In Lagos on Monday rights groups marched to parliament calling for it to declare a state of emergency on rape and sexual violence.
The march followed the death of 22-year-old student Uwaila Vera Omozuwa and the rape and killing less than a week later of another student, Barakat Bello.
Omozuwa died after she was attacked in a church in Benin City, while Bello was raped and killed during a robbery in her home in the southwestern city of Ibadan on June 1.
