80-year-old Arab groom caught celebrating wedding night with 18-year-old bride in Bangalore

An eighty-year-old groom from Saudi Arabia, who was spending his wedding night with an eighteen-year-old girl from Bangalore, got the shock of his life when the Bangalore police, on trail of suspected terrorists, knocked on the door of his hotel room.

After being tipped off about suspicious movements of group of men and burkha-clad foreign women in a lodge in Bangalore on the Independence Day, the police raided the premises late on Tuesday night, only find an octogenarian native Riyadh in Saudi Arabia celebrating his wedding night with a newly wedded bride, aged barely 18 years, from R T Nagar in Bangalore.

The Arab’s son, daughter-in-law and grand children, who had arrived for the wedding from Riyadh, were found in another room of the same lodge, police said.

The police claimed that they raided the lodge on the suspicion that foreign terrorists might have been holed up in the lodge. In view of the general alert on account of Independence Day celebrations, the police did not wish to take chances and carried out the raid immediately after being tipped off.

The police had a tough time interrogating the group of family from Saudi Arabia as they spoke only Arabic. However, inquiries with the lodge owner revealed that the Saudis had a local contact by name Fathima, who turned out to be a marriage broker. The police have detained the Saudi family for interrogation while Fathima has been taken into custody.

Even if the tip off about terrorists holed up in the lodge turned out to be a false alarm, the police claimed they stumbled upon the racket of rich and elderly Arabs allegedly purchasing young Indian girls for marriage. Police said Fathima, a Saudi-returned maid, tempted poor Muslim parents to give their daughters in marriage to rich Arabs so that they can return with a lot of wealth. “This racket, which is rampant in Hyderabad and Kerala, may be raising its ugly head even in Bangalore”, a police official felt.