MADINAH, 3 January 2008 — A Saudi family forcefully opened a wedding hall that had been shutdown by the Madinah municipality because of a safety violation, the daily Al-Madinah reported yesterday. The family refused to abide by municipality orders to evict the premises.
The municipality had informed the wedding hall’s owner to submit supplementary documentation regarding the wedding hall’s safety plans and gave him a deadline to submit the documents or face closure. The owner complied and submitted all of the necessary papers. After a few days the municipality called and informed him that his papers had been lost and that he must resubmit the papers. He obliged and was then given a date when officials would come to inspect the wedding hall.
But when they arrived, instead of inspecting it, they chained the doors of the wedding hall and shut it down. When the man protested and explained that he had weddings reserved at the hall and that he would lose a lot of business, municipality officials told him that they were simply following orders from the head of the Madinah municipality.
The owner was left with no choice but to call all of the families that had reserved the wedding hall and return the deposits they had made.
Most of the families quickly scrambled to book other wedding halls, except for one family; despite the owner’s protests, they showed up at the wedding hall and broke the chains and vowed that the wedding would go on as scheduled. They said that they had already distributed wedding invitations to all of the guests and it was too late to change things.
Police were eventually called in to forcefully evict the family but they stood ground and refused to leave. The father of the bride told police to take up their complaints with the municipality and not bother them.
“We refuse to be victims of the disagreement between the wedding hall owner and the municipality. All I know is that I reserved this place on this date and I paid the money. I will continue the wedding whether they like it or not,” said the father.
Police and municipality officials were left with no choice but to allow the family to continue the wedding and close the place down after the wedding finished.
