MADINAH, 5 August 2006 — A fifty-year-old man said he was duped into paying a SR25,000 dowry for marriage to a ten-year-old girl, the daily Al-Watan reported yesterday.

The girl’s mother said the older man had called her and identified himself as the future husband of her daughter. Initially the woman was outraged, thinking it was a prank call or a message from a sicko. After a second attempt to “collect his due”, the man explained that he had paid a dowry to the girl’s father.

The woman then asked the man to stop by. With the woman’s brother in the room, she explained to the man that her ex-husband, who had abandoned his wife and daughter shortly after she was born, was responsible for scamming dowry money from the fifty-year-old would-be husband.

The woman said her ex-husband was in financial difficulty and had orchestrated this scam.

The man, oblivious to the fact that it is not acceptable to pay a dowry to a father unbeknownst to a daughter, regardless of her age, was still under the impression that the girl was of an acceptable age for marriage until the woman showed him what he had “purchased” unseen. The man then became very angry at being suckered and vowed to sue the father for the dowry money.

The paper, quoting a local judge in Madinah, said such arrangements are illegal. The judge said this isn’t the first time an ex-husband has tried to extract dowry money from other men.

Dowries are the rightful property of brides, but often fathers attempt to hedge control of the money from their daughters — either to protect the funds from the new husband who might try to get the money back or for more selfish reasons.