An image of a young girl and an old man is being shared on Facebook with a claim that the old man married his daughter. Let’s try to check the authenticity of the image in the post.
Claim: The photo shows 75-year-old Muslim man, who married his 15-year-old daughter.
Fact: The old man is not the girl’s father. The girl (a 16-year-old Hyderabad girl) was married to the old man (a Muscat national) for 5 lakhs. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When the image in the photo is run through Google Reverse Image Search, many news stories containing the same photo can be found in the search results. According to the news story in NDTV, a 16-year-old Hyderabad girl was married to a 75-year-old Muscat national for Rs. 5 lakhs. The case attracted media attention in August 2017 when the mother of the girl approached the police to help her daughter, who complained to her mother that she is being ill-treated by her husband in Muscat. Not only media, even Maneka Gandhi, then Woman and Child Development Minister, tweeted about this forcible marriage. More details about the case can be read here and here.
This incident of a 16-yr-old being forcibly married to an elderly man in Oman is deeply disturbing. https://t.co/FB4NbDtq8i via @indiatoday
— Maneka Sanjay Gandhi (@Manekagandhibjp) August 17, 2017
To sum it up, the 75-year-old man in the photo is not the girl’s father.
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