Moment police raided a sham marriage between Portuguese bride and Nigerian groom who barely knew each other.
These pictures(below) show police officers interrupting a sham wedding between a Nigerian man living illegally in the UK and a Portuguese woman.
Home Office immigration officers swooped on the ceremony, which was held at a registry office in Harrow, North London.
The man, 32, has now been sent back to Nigeria, and the woman, 22, is on bail until November 7th.
Broadcast on Sky News this morning, immigration officers said the woman may have married for cash on three separate occasions.
Police interrupted the marriage in front of guests and took the bride and groom for questioning separately.
It emerged that they knew little about each other and that the man was working in the UK illegally.
Harrow Council leader Susan Hall said: 'It is appalling to see the lengths some people go to in dressing up and organising guests for a sham marriage.
The photographs and footage come after it emerged yesterday that one in five civil marriages in parts of Britain may be bogus.
Some 15,000 such ceremonies a year are taking place simply to get around immigration law, estimates one of the country’s most senior registrars, Mark Rimmer.
Last year the Home Office received nearly 1,900 warnings about potentially bogus unions.
But Mr Rimmer, the chairman of the Local Registration Services Association, said that figure represented ‘the tip of a very large iceberg’. He said that in urban areas, up to 20 per cent of marriages are ‘suspicious’.
He estimated that overall, 15,000 of the 173,000 civil weddings each year in England and Wales could be fake unions designed to evade immigration laws.
Registrars were powerless to prevent couples they suspected of faking their relationships from marrying and were forced to conduct the ceremonies ‘through gritted teeth’, he said.
See more photos below....
Why wasn't the man sensored like the lady. Is it because he's Nigerian even though he fell victim to a European love seller.
ReplyDeleteOther are censored but the African. Are these real police? What do the want to tell the world?
ReplyDelete