Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, has provided an explanation for why he removed the tweet that denounced the May 12 murder of Deborah Samuel by religious zealots at a school in Sokoto for supposed blasphemy.
On May 12, Muslim classmates of Miss Deborah Yakubu, a second-year female student at Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, killed and set her ablaze for reportedly insulting the Prophet Mohammed on WhatsApp.
Atiku responded to the tragedy by condemning the murder and calling for its perpetrators to be apprehended in a message on his verified twitter account @Atiku.
There cannot be an explanation for such a horrible murder, he wrote in a tweet.
Deborah Yakubu was killed, and those responsible must be held accountable.
I send my sympathies to her family and friends.
Some muslims saw the tweet, and condemned Atiku’s position threatening to not vote for him.
Atiku’s message was taken down within minutes.
In response to this, Nigerians accused him of caring more about votes than Nigerian lives and slammed him for deleting the post.
On Sunday, December 11, Atiku claimed that he deleted the tweet about Deborah’s murder because he hadn’t given it the appropriate consent before it was posted. He made this statement during a Channels TV town hall meeting.
The PDP presidential candidate stated that he denounced the murder since it was obviously committed in violation of Islamic beliefs.
“I denounced it (murder). There is nowhere it is said or there is an injunction in the Islamic faith that you can go and take someone’s life.
“It has to be through due process.”
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