Morning Star News reports – A mother of four children in eastern Uganda remains in pain after her Muslim father beat her and forced her to take mosquito repellant when he learned that she had left Islam and her Muslim husband and married a Christian, sources said.
When Hajira Namusobya, 34, visited her family in Pallisa on July 31, she was unaware that her family had learned that she had divorced the Muslim who had abused her so severely that she attempted suicide, she said. Her ex-husband in Kawangasi village, Butebo District had nearly killed her with torture, besides beating her weekly, she said.
“I tried to commit suicide by hanging myself with a rope, but I failed because my furious husband was following and monitoring my actions,” Namusobya said.
She had requested her father pay back the bride price that her Muslim husband had paid him, but he refused, she said. As the abuse intensified, Namusobya last year met a Christian woman in Nakaloke village, Mbale District, who urged her to pray to Christ for help.
Later the woman, an evangelist unnamed for security reasons who preaches at her church, led Namusobya to put her faith in Christ on Feb. 2, 2020. She kept her faith secret and decided to divorce her husband the following month, though he insisted on custody of their children, now ages 13, 11, 9 and 6, which deeply pained her, she said.
Her father, Al-haji Shafiki Pande, a Haji or Muslim who has traveled to Mecca for the Hajj, after dinner called for a family meeting and asked her about her new husband, she said.
“I told him everything, how I left the furious husband who almost took away my life and got married to a Christian man who is friendly and treats me as a wife,” Namusobya told Morning Star News. “My dad in a loud voice replied that that is impossible and it’s blasphemous to leave a Muslim for a Christian man, saying, ‘More so, you are a daughter of a Haji.”
He told her to return to her ex-husband in the morning and renounce Christianity, but she refused, Namusobya said.
“He slapped me and brought out his secret stick and Doom mosquito repellant and beat me badly, then forced me to take mosquito Doom,” she said. “It was too terrible.”
Her cries brought a neighbor, a former area chairman who is a moderate Muslim, to her rescue, and he took her to a nearby hospital, she said. Unconscious for three days, she later learned that the neighbor had threatened to press murder charges against her father.