DAMMAM — It was third time unlucky for a newlywed expatriate couple who twice postponed their wedding, only to be arrested for overstaying on the day they finally got married. An African groom and an Indonesian bride were on their way to the wedding hall when they were arrested by the police and taken to prison to spend their first night together behind bars, albeit in separate sections. Both were charged with overstaying, Al-Yaum newspaper reported Tuesday. The passport police along with representatives from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Hai'a) nabbed the couple as the wedding procession made its way toward the wedding hall. The groom, who had premonitions that he might be caught any time, had delayed his wedding twice before. But this time around he and his bride, a housemaid who had escaped from her sponsor in Riyadh, went ahead with the wedding, but failed to escape the long arm of the law. The bride met her husband in Dammam. The groom's friends helped him rent the wedding hall and print the invitation cards, but the same friends vanished from the scene when news of the arrest reached the wedding hall. One minute there were 150 men and women rapturously waiting for the arrival of the couple, and in the next the hall emptied out when they got wind of the arrest, sparking a hasty exodus for fear that the passport police might arrive at the hall. — SG
