Posts misleadingly claim to show Yemeni man and his child bride who died after wedding night

Online debates on differences in religious customs are often riddled with misleading claims. A post circulating in Nigeria shares a screenshot of an article about an eight-year-old girl in Yemen who allegedly died after suffering internal bleeding on her wedding night. The screenshot also contains photos of a young girl and a grey-bearded man, supposedly the couple in question. However, this is misleading; while a report about a child bride dying on her wedding night caused controversy in Yemen back in 2013 – with authorities denying her death – the photos recently circulating online have nothing to do with this case. The photo of the man comes from news articles about an imam who was convicted of paedophilia in the United Kingdom in 2012, while the photo of the girl was on the internet already in 2010.

“Rawan, an 8-year-old Arab girl d!ed due to internal injur!es which she suffered on her w£dding night. Her 40-year-old husband didn’t show mercy on the wedding night (sic),” the post’s caption reads.

The headline of the news article in the attached screenshot reads: “8-year-old child bride dies from internal bleeding after her wedding night.”

The first lines of the article, visible in the screenshot, read: “An eight-year-old Yemeni girl passed on from internal bleeding on her wedding night in the wake of a wedding a man 5 times her age, a social activist and two nearby occupants said, for a situation that has caused an outcry in the media and resuscitated banter about child brides (sic).”

The screenshot also includes a photo of a young girl and a photo of a grey-bearded man, suggesting they are the couple in question.

The claim also appeared here on Facebook with a screenshot of the same article. The post was dated March 21, 2022.

However, the claim is misleading.

2013 Yemeni incident

Child marriages are widespread in Yemen. According to Unicef’s latest report on the subject, Yemen is home to an estimated 4 million child brides, meaning they were married before the age of 18 (archived here). Of these, 1.4 million were married before they turned 15.

An internet search shows the article in the screenshot was published on an Indian website on March 21, 2022 (archived here).

The second paragraph of the article stated that the incident occurred “last week,” suggesting that it happened earlier in March 2022.

AFP Fact Check found no credible reports about such an incident in Yemen in 2022. However, there was an outcry in 2013 over a similar case where an eight-year-old child reportedly died of internal bleeding in Yemen after marrying a man who was five times her age (archived here).

Authorities in Yemen denied that the death occurred, and the journalist who first reported the story alleged that officials were attempting to bury the case (archived here).

Gulf News later published a video report in which they interviewed a man described as the girl’s father, who presented his child to the press to show she was still alive (archived here and here).

Unrelated images

Reverse image searches showed that the images of the man and the girl are unrelated to the 2013 case in Yemen – and that the two images are not related to each other, either.

The man in the photo is Ebrahim Yusuf Kazi, an imam jailed for paedophilia in the United Kingdom in 2011 (archived here).

His photo was published in numerous news articles at the time.

Meanwhile, the photo of the girl was on the internet before the 2013 incident.

It was featured in a video report on worldwide child marriage rates by Russian broadcaster Russia-1, published in October 2012 (archived here).

Reverse image search results using TinEye also found the photo listed on stock image websites going back to 2010, though it is no longer available on those sites.

In one occurrence of the image, on a now-defunct stock photo site, the file was named “girl playing dress up with veil”.