Police took her in to protect her. A mob took her out.

On June 21, Ummulkhair Muhammad was walking to her Islamic lecture in Maraban Jos, Kaduna State, when children accused her of trying to steal them. Police later said there was no evidence to support the claim. It didn't matter. Officers rescued her from an angry crowd and placed her in protective custody at the Maraban Jos Division, the correct procedure, the thing that is supposed to work.

Hundreds of residents then stormed the station. They overpowered the officers on duty, dragged her out, and burned her alive.

Her husband, Aliyu Muhammad, has spent the weeks since trying to understand how a woman his community had already reported as safe ended up dead within hours. A rights lawyer's petition alleges something worse than a station simply being overwhelmed. It claims the divisional police officer personally handed her to the crowd rather than holding the line.

Last week, police arraigned 24 suspects on charges including conspiracy and culpable homicide. The case was adjourned to July 21. The Inspector General has separately ordered a criminal investigations unit to examine the conduct of the officers who were supposed to be guarding her. Two separate processes are now running. One is for the crowd. The other is for the people paid to stop the crowd. Only the first of those processes existed before June 21. The second only exists now because a woman is dead.

Maraban Jos has been here before. Community elders point to an episode roughly two decades ago when a divisional police officer was killed in the same area. It's a reminder that this stretch of the Kaduna-Zaria highway has a long relationship with crowds that decide they don't need a court. The difference this time is that the state had already done its job once. Officers rescued her from the first mob. The system worked for about an hour before it stopped working entirely.

The Sultan of Sokoto's office called the killing a collapse of moral restraint and demanded a transparent investigation into the conduct of the police division involved. Amnesty International described this kind of mob accusation followed by mob violence as becoming normal nationwide, which is its own quiet indictment. When a human rights organisation stops calling something shocking and starts calling it typical, that is usually the moment the country should be most alarmed, not least.

Protective custody is supposed to be the point where the state's promise becomes real. A person walks into a station accused of something they didn't do. The building itself is meant to be the thing standing between them and whoever wants to hurt them. In Maraban Jos, the building did not hold. Nobody has yet explained why.

Ummulkhair Muhammad had four children. She left for an Islamic lecture on a Sunday morning and never came home.