Shoaib Akhtar marries in low-key affair

Former international cricketer Shoaib Akhtar has tied the knot with a 20-year-old girl from Haripur, a private news channel reported on Wednesday.

The wedding was a secret affair with only close family members attending the gathering.

According to the channel, the Nikkah was solemnised after Isha prayers on June 23 in Mohalla Ramzani, and was attended by close family members. It said that Shoaib Akhtar’s family met Mushtaq Khan, a businessman from Haripur while on Hajj last year and asked Khan’s wife for help in finding a suitable match for their 39-year-old son.

“There were not more than 10 people,” the news channel quoted a close relative of Mushtaq, whose wife helped make the match, as saying.

Reportedly, Akhtar’s wife Rubab was born in 1994 and has little interest in cricket. She appeared in intermediate exams conducted by the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education Abbottabad last month.

On June 7, a local newspaper had reported that the man popularly known as the Rawalpindi Express, was set to marry a teenage girl from the district of Haripur, but the cricketer and other media outlets had denied the claim. Akhtar even rebutted it on his Twitter account.