[An Nahar] Police enforcing Islamic law in Nigeria's city of Kano publicly destroyed some 240,000 bottles of beer on Wednesday, the latest move in a wider crackdown on behavior deemed "immoral" in the area.The horror! The horror!
The banned booze had been confiscated from trucks coming into the city in recent weeks, said officials from the Hisbah, the patrol tasked with enforcing the strict Islamic law, known as sharia.
Kano's Hisbah chief Aminu Daurawa said at the bottle-breaking ceremony he had "the ardent hope this will bring an end to the consumption of such prohibited substances".
A large bulldozer smashed the bottles to shouts of "Allahu Ahkbar" (
Kegs containing more than 8,000 liters of a local alcoholic brew called "burukutu" and 320,000 cigarettes were also destroyed.
"We hope this measure will help restore the tarnished image of Kano," said Daurawa.
"Oh, yasss! We much prefer being known as an ignorant and intolerant backwater! Please leave us to stew in our poverty and corruption."
Since September, the Hisbah have launched sweeping crackdowns and made hundreds of arrests in Kano following a state-government directive to cleanse the commercial hub of so-called "immoral" practices.
The 9,000-strong
Sharia was reintroduced across northern Nigeria in 2001, but the code has been unevenly applied.