A teenage girl threatened with the death penalty for murdering her 35-year-old husband in Nigeria, faces an uncertain future after being released from prison.

15 year-old Wasila Tasi’u was accused of killing Umar Sani and three other men with rat poison shortly after they were married. She has spent the last 10 months locked up as her case dragged on, held up by judicial staff strike action and administrative delays.

“An entirely avoidable tragedy, leaving in its wake four dead men and a thoroughly traumatised little girl. Poison – the only feasible escape to freedom – devised from the wild imagination of a naive, depressed little girl caught up in a painful forced marriage to a much older man. A tough lesson for families, communities and a government that is still ambivalent about sanctioning the perpetrators of child marriage.”