A 90-year-old Saudi Arabian man is suing the family of his 15-year-old child-bride after she shut herself in her bedroom on their wedding night.
The terrified teen locked the door from the inside so that her new husband could not enter on their first night as a married couple, and two days later she fled back to her parents’ home.
Now her elderly husband wants his money back as he claims he paid the parents £10,767 ($17,500) for the teenager so they could wed.
The 90-year-old said he paid the dowry to the young girl’s Saudi mother and Yemeni father, making the marriage ‘legal and correct’, Al Arabiya reported.
The 15-year-old’s arranged marriage sparked outrage and widespread condemnation in Saudi Arabia where activists took to Twitter calling it child trafficking and prostitution.
A Mouhammad Khaled Alnuzha posted on his account: ‘Is this a case of human trafficking crimes punishable by law?’
Another tweeted: ‘She is still considered as a product! A father sells his daughter without mercy, to be bought by money and status and power; all of it for the sake of fulfilling a desire.’
A member of the Saudi National Association for Human Rights (NSHR), Suhaila Zein el-Abedin urged authorities to ‘save this child from tragedy,’ adding that marriage in Islam must be based on mutual consent.
She also blamed the girl’s parents for accepting the dowry and marrying off their daughter to a man 75 years older than her, underlining the importance of establishing a minimum age of 18 for marriage in Saudi Arabia.
