Groom's mother jailed for bridal snatch
Published 23 October, 2007, 05:14
In Russia's Stavropol Region a woman has been given six years in prison after she confessed to organising the abduction of a 14-year-old girl. The aim of the kidnapping was to force the girl to marry her son.
A young bride being abducted in broad daylight is nothing unusual in the Caucasus.
For centuries it has been a tradition in the region, often staged, where the woman has already agreed to say, 'I do.'
Many young men in the region kidnap brides and film the moment of the woman's abduction on their mobile phones. The images captured are then used to show off their prowess.
However, it has a darker side, and a practice once considered noble is becoming violent – less a tradition and more an abduction – and the really violent incidents usually stay off camera.
For Svetlana Gavrilova the nightmare started when a group of people armed with baseball bats and steel crow-bars kidnapped her 14-year-old daughter Tamara.
“They came at 4 o'clock in the morning when our whole family was sleeping. They gagged my little girl and took her away and my husband was badly beaten,” she said.
After searching unsuccessfully for a few days, the parents discovered the identity and the whereabouts of the would-be groom.
But the kidnappers refused to give Tamara back to the parents – who were then beaten up.
They had planned to hold the 14-year-old girl hostage until she agreed to the wedding.
However the marriage was not to be. Police helped to return Tamara home and arrested the mother of the frustrated groom. The woman identified only by her surname, Samoylova, confessed to being behind the kidnapping.
“The court found that Samoylova organised the kidnapping of a certain underage person and the court sentences her to six years in prison,” said federal judge Andrey Kablov.
The very fact that it came to court is unusual. This year alone, there have already been 55 bride kidnappings reported in Russia's Dagestan region, but only three cases have made it to court. The others ended in marriage.
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