14-Year-Old Child Bride Poisons 35-Year-Old Husband One Week After Wedding

From the BBC:

A 14-year-old girl in the northern Nigerian state of Kano has confessed to killing the man she was forced to marry, police say. Wasilu Umar admitted killing her husband, who was more than twice her age, by concealing rat poison in his food, the police in Kano said. Three other people also died and 10 were taken to hospital apparently after eating the same food.

[…]The girl’s father had forced her to marry the 35-year-old man, police said.

Here’s what’s up with early marriage in Nigeria: although it’s technically illegal under a law that corroborates the UN’s Child Rights Act (which sets 18 as the minimum marriage age), there’s still a clause in the Constitution stating “any woman who is married shall be deemed to be of full age,” and a third of Nigerian states do not uphold any minimum. In the mostly Muslim northwest part of the country, almost half of all girls are married by age 15–in Kebbi state, the average marriage age is 11–and “only 2 percent of 15–19-year-old married girls are in school, compared to 69 percent of unmarried girls.”