"I Was Just Visiting My Mother": How a Confession Sank an Alibi Defence: Abdulsalam Suleiman v. The State [2026] 11 NWLR (Pt. 2052) 537

 

"I Was Just Visiting My Mother": How a Confession Sank an Alibi Defence

Abdulsalam Suleiman v. The State [2026] 11 NWLR (Pt. 2052) 537 — Supreme Court of Nigeria

There is a particular kind of legal trap an accused person can walk into without realising it: telling the police, in a signed statement, exactly where you were when a crime happened — and having that location turn out to be the crime scene itself. That is precisely what happened to Abdulsalam Suleiman, whose own words to investigators became the very evidence that convicted him of armed robbery and, on final appeal, closed off the one defence that might have saved him.

The Facts

On the night of 31 May 2009, a trader named Alhaji Ibrahim Abubakar closed his shop in Dinkawa Village, Charanchi Local Government Area of Katsina State, gathered the day's takings, locked the money in the boot of his car, and drove home. His younger brother followed on foot and, approaching the house, saw men flashing torchlights outside. When the two brothers confronted them, the men announced themselves as thieves and threatened to shoot if anyone came closer. They beat the trader so badly that he collapsed while trying to flee, striking his head on a wall. By the time neighbours discovered what had happened, the boot of his car had been forced open and the money taken. He died on the way to hospital.

About a month later, police acting on a tip-off arrested Suleiman, who in turn implicated an accomplice, Ibrahim Abdullahi. Both men were charged with culpable homicide and armed robbery; the homicide count was later struck out to avoid double conviction on the same facts, leaving armed robbery as the sole charge. Suleiman pleaded not guilty. At trial, the prosecution called seven witnesses, tendered Suleiman's own statement to the police — made in Hausa and English — as well as a blood-stained stick and a pair of dark goggles recovered from the scene. Suleiman testified in his own defence, denying the robbery entirely and denying he had ever made any confession. He told the court he was a butcher from Bauchi State who had simply travelled to Dinkawa Village to visit his mother, and that a man named Darda'u had wrongly reported him to the police. The trial court convicted him and sentenced him to death. The Court of Appeal upheld that conviction, and Suleiman took his fight to the Supreme Court.

The Journey Through the Courts

Before the apex court, Suleiman's lawyers argued two things. First, that the two eyewitnesses at the scene, the deceased's son and a neighbour, had only described unidentified attackers warning them away — neither one had actually named or recognised Suleiman — so any conviction had to rest on weak, uncorroborated circumstantial evidence or on a confession that Suleiman had retracted and that failed the classic tests for reliability. Second, that the courts below had failed to properly weigh the alibi he says he raised: that he was in the village only to see his mother, nowhere near the robbery.

The Court's Reasoning

A confession doesn't need corroboration — but this one had plenty anyway. The Supreme Court began from a settled point: a confession is treated as the strongest form of proof available in a criminal trial, and a court can convict on one alone once it is free, direct, and voluntary, without needing anything else to back it up. Because Suleiman raised no objection when his statement was tendered at trial, the law presumed it had been made voluntarily. But the Court didn't even need to lean on that presumption alone — the statement was independently corroborated by the two eyewitnesses' accounts of men warning them off at gunpoint, by their confirmation that money was indeed stolen from the car boot, and by the recovered stick and goggles matching details Suleiman himself had described in his statement.

Once a suspect places himself at the scene, questions of identity fall away. The Court made a point that cuts sharply against Suleiman's identification argument: where an accused person confesses to being present and involved, disputes about eyewitness identification become irrelevant. His own statement did the identifying for the prosecution, making the eyewitness dispute beside the point.

The alibi collapsed under its own weight. This was the heart of the appeal, and the Court's reasoning here is the real lesson of the case. An alibi defence has to be raised at the earliest possible opportunity — ideally the moment a suspect is first questioned — with concrete details of where he was and who can confirm it, precisely so the police have a real chance to investigate and check the claim before trial. A vague, late-arriving alibi is treated as an afterthought and given little weight. Suleiman's problem went further than lateness, though: nowhere in his own statement to police had he actually claimed to be elsewhere. Instead, he had placed himself squarely at the scene, describing his role in preventing bystanders from intervening. At trial, he still never said outright that he wasn't in the village that night — only that he'd come from Bauchi to see his mother. With nothing on record pointing to an alibi, there was nothing for the police to investigate, and nothing for the trial court or the Court of Appeal to have failed to consider.

Courts don't invent defences. The Supreme Court underlined a broader principle here: a court must weigh every defence an accused person actually raises, however weak — but it has no business manufacturing a defence out of thin air where the record doesn't support one. Doing so would mean straying outside the evidence that binds both parties.

No miscarriage of justice. Given a confession that was voluntary, detailed, and corroborated on multiple fronts, plus an alibi that was never genuinely raised in the first place, the Court found nothing remotely resembling the kind of grossly unfair outcome that would justify overturning two courts' concurrent findings.

The Verdict

The Supreme Court unanimously dismissed Suleiman's appeal, affirming both his conviction for armed robbery and his death sentence.

Key Takeaways

  • A voluntary confession, once admitted without objection, can carry a conviction on its own — and any corroborating witness evidence only strengthens it further.
  • What you tell the police at the point of arrest matters enormously. A statement that places you at the scene can make it legally impossible to later claim you were somewhere else.
  • An alibi has to be raised early, specifically, and to the police first — naming where you were and who can confirm it — so the claim can actually be investigated before trial.
  • Courts will not build a defence for an accused person that the evidence doesn't support. If the record shows no alibi was genuinely raised, an appellate court isn't required to treat one as having existed.
  • Where two courts below have carefully reviewed the same facts and reached the same conclusion, the Supreme Court will rarely disturb it unless the decision was clearly wrong or built on the wrong legal principles.

Test

  1. How did the supreme court rule regarding the appellant's confessional statement in this case?
  2. What was the supreme court's finding on the appellant's defence of Alibi?


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