Nigerian envoy to Tehran
summoned over Sheikh Zakzaky’s conditions
TEHRAN – The Foreign
Ministry has summoned Nigeria’s envoy to Tehran to voice the Islamic Republic’s
concerns over the conditions of top Shiite cleric and leader of the Islamic
Movement in Nigeria (IMN) Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky.
“Recently, the Nigerian
charge d'affaires was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and was informed about
Iran’s concerns over Sheikh Zakzaky’s conditions in the African country,”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said at his bi-weekly press conference
in Tehran on Monday.
“The Nigerian charge
d'affaires offered some explanations and he is supposed to convey our concerns
to the Nigerian government,” he added.
The spokesman expressed
the hope that the Foreign Ministry’s efforts would yield results and that the
prominent cleric would recover soon.
Iran has spared no
efforts through diplomatic and political ways to resolve the issue, he
stressed.
According to the Tasnim
news agency, Sheikh Zakzaky has been held in detention since December 2015 and
was charged just in April 2018 with murder, culpable homicide, unlawful
assembly, disruption of public peace and other accusations. He has pleaded not
guilty.
In 2016, Nigeria’s
federal high court ordered his unconditional release from jail following a
trial, but the government has so far refused to set him free.
The top cleric, who is
in his mid-sixties, lost his left eyesight in a raid which was carried out by
the Nigerian army on his residence in the northern town of Zaria in December
2015.
During the raid,
Zakzaky’s wife sustained serious wounds too and more than 300 of his followers
and three of his sons were killed. Zakzaky, his wife, and a large number of the
cleric’s followers have since been in custody.
On Friday, the UK-based
Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) announced that it had received reports
about Zakzaky’s health condition that it had further worsened.
The IHRC — which had
sent a medical team to Nigeria in April to examine the health condition of
Sheikh Zakzaky and his wife — has already said the specialist treatment they require
can only be fully accessed outside the African country.
Separately, members of
the IMN had also said last week that the cleric had been poisoned in prison and
required urgent medical care abroad.
MH/PA
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