duped again

Hyderabad, Dec. 26: Like many other young women before her, Sameena Begum thought marriage would be her way out of grinding poverty.

So what her Omani groom hadn’t come down in person? His photograph was there.

Today, the 23-year-old’s price of freedom from her penniless, mentally ill husband is Rs 33,000. The same amount that Nazia Begum’s family in Hyderabad has been asked to pay up if they want to get back their girl.

She, too, had got married, after just one look at a photograph of the groom, the mentally ill twin brother of Sameena’s husband.

Their in-laws want the money to compensate for the wedding costs and the fare back home.

Tortured and under virtual house arrest, the two women informed their parents. Their families then filed complaints with Hyderabad police. The cops arrested the local qazi, Waheed Quereshi, who had solemnised the weddings on July 16.

Grilled, the 43-year-old confessed that he had solemnised marriages of several young women to aged grooms settled in the US, Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan, South Africa, Somalia and the United Arab Emirates.

“The qazi led us to believe that the twin brothers — Mohammed and Yusuf — of Oman were rich and government servants,” says Sameena’s father Syed Mustafa.

The bubble burst soon after Sameena and Nazia landed in Oman in September. They found that their husbands lived on government dole and their relatives had sought wives for them to take care of the twins and also do domestic chores.

Mustafa says Sameena and Nazia’s in-laws are refusing to give back their passports unless they get the Rs 66,000 they have demanded. But with the Indian embassy in Oman alerted, and the exposure, there’s “pressure on the grooms’ side to at least not torture the girls”.

In Andhra, state minorities minister Mohammed Fareeduddin said he had approached the Oman government for speedy release of the Hyderabad girls.

This is not the first time poor girls in Hyderabad have been taken for a ride by Arabs.

Community leaders and clerics, however, defend the wedding of Hyderabad girls to aged Arabs. They say it is a way out of poverty and the heavy demands for dowry by local grooms. “The dowry for an auto-rickshaw driver is around Rs 1 lakh. For a government servant, it is as high as Rs 5 lakh,” says marriage broker Syed Nawaz.