Family forces atheist son into mental ward

A staunchly Muslim family in northern Nigeria has forced their son into a mental hospital for declaring himself an atheist, according to a lawyer and supporters who have started an online campaign to #FreeMubarak.

Chemical engineer Mubarak Bala, 29, alerted people to his plight with tweets allegedly from a smuggled phone that he used in the toilet of Kano city’s Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, where he says he is being drugged and held against his will in a psychiatric ward.

In his tweets, Bala said his father and three uncles beat him up, and his brother injected him with a sedative. He woke up 30 hours later in the hospital.

“My neck still hurts from the stranglehold of my father, and the beat(ing) of uncles dislocated my finger and arm,” he said in one message.

Lawyer Muhammad Bello Shehu said Bala’s father told him he committed his son for his own safety.

“He said that the reason he had to take him to the hospital is for his own security because once people got glimpse that he is denouncing the existence of God... he could be lynched and the house set on fire,” Shehu said.

Bala complained that he feels weak, has lost weight and his hands are shaking from all the drugs he is being forced to take.

He said that while he was sedated his family used his phone to post on Facebook that he had returned to the Muslim faith, and described his father as an Islamic leader who “can’t afford to have a non-Muslim family member, so he declared me insane.”

In a blog, the father describes himself as a journalist and director general of Kano state’s Directorate of Societal Reorientation, one of the bodies that enforces Islamic Shariah law.

Lawyer Shehu said the father and physicians are saying that Mubarak Bala has psychological problems that predate his renunciation of Islam.

The son tweeted that his family claims he has suffered a “personality change” that caused him to become an apostate.