A woman in Jammu and Kashmir managed to marry and cheat 27 grooms, robbing them off their jewellery and cash.
The astonishing saga finally came to a dramatic end when unsuspecting grooms, bound together by their shared misfortune, converged on a local police station, only to discover that they had fallen victim to the same woman. “A local middleman approached me, saying I will have to pay Rs 2 lakh to a woman in order to marry her,” said Altaf Mir from Budgam.
After paying Rs 2 lakh as ‘meher’, a mandatory payment or gift that the Muslim groom is required to give to the bride as part of the marriage contract, the broker arranged his marriage with the woman in April last year. “After two weeks of marriage, she went to see her parents in Rajouri one morning and vanished,” he said.
Under the cover of love and marriage, the woman skillfully manipulated her unsuspecting victims in Budgam district of Kashmir by expertly weaving a web of deceit. With a well-rehearsed script, she would marry each man, promising eternal devotion, only to abruptly vanish, citing a visit to her parents’ home as a reason for her departure.
Little did grooms know that this was a ploy to move on to her next victim. The shocking revelation of this fraud unfolded gradually as victims began to piece together their eerily similar stories. A shared sense of desperation led them to a police station in Budgam district. Nisar Ahmed, another Budgam resident, said the woman went to hospital with his mother and escaped. Behind the scenes of this elaborate deception lay a network of brokers who facilitated the conniving woman’s marriage schemes.
These brokers, driven by greed, played a pivotal role in orchestrating the fraudulent unions. The police have registered a case against her and the probe in underway. They are also trying to track down the woman and her associates.
Abid Zahoor Andrabi, the lawyer of the victims, suspected a larger inter-district racket involving multiple accomplices, highlighting the woman’s aliases on marriage documents as Zaheen, Ilayas, and Shaheena, with her true identity remaining unknown.
