Respect party MP produces Labour opponent’s alleged marriage certificate at hustings, claiming she was lying when she said she had been forced into a violent and sexually abusive marriage aged 15

George Galloway has admitted ordering an intermediary in Pakistan to dig out the marriage certificate of his Labour rival in order to try to prove she had been 16, not 15, when she claims to have been forced into marriage.

But Galloway, who has a 10,140 majority, denied that the intermediary had pretended to be Shah’s late father in order to dupe clerics into handing over the marriage documentation.

Officials from his Respect party dispute that Naz Shah, Labour’s candidate in Bradford West, was forced into marriage, on the grounds that her mother was at the ceremony.

Shah made the impersonation claim at highly charged hustings in Bradford on Wednesday night after Galloway produced what he claimed was her nikah, her Islamic marriage certificate. Telling her she had “only a passing acquaintance with the truth”, Galloway said: “You claimed – and gullible journalists believed you – that you were subject to a forced marriage at the age of 15. But you were not 15, you were 16 and a half. I have your nikah in my pocket.”

The age difference mattered, he suggested, because it “slandered” the Pakistani community and played into “every stereotype”. He was cheered by a large contingent of the Bradford crowd and heckled by others.

Shah, who has spoken about being forced into a violent and sexually abusive marriage aged 15, then accused Galloway’s contact in Mirpur, in Pakisani Kashmir, of impersonating her father, Abid Shah, who has been dead for many years.

Vowing to sue Galloway for defamation after the general election, she said she could prove that she had first married on 25 December 1988 when she had just turned 15.

On Thursday she told the Guardian she had instructed a lawyer in Mirpur to go the office of the muftis, or religious clerics, and obtain the 1988 nikah. She said that nikah arrived in Bradford on Wednesday. The Guardian has seen a copy of the 1988 nikah.

Shah also insisted that there were two nikahs in existence – the first, from 1988, and the second from 1990, which she claimed was obtained in order that her Pakistani husband could get a spouse visa to come and live with her in the UK. She said the British authorities would not have allowed her husband to come into the country with her had they known she was only 15 at the time of the marriage.

This claim was rubbished by Galloway’s spokesman Ron McKay, who said in an email: “You cannot have two nikahs to the same person Islamically – without going through a divorce first. Any divorce would show on a nikah and there is none.”

Asked where and how Galloway had obtained the nikah he waved around at the hustings, McKay said: “We were first given a copy of the nikah by a close family member in this country. We wanted to verify that it was authentic so we arranged for a person in Mirpur to obtain a copy directly from the registry office. There was no duplicity involved. And both versions are identical.

“The person did not pretend to be Abid Shah who, I understand, was extremely well-known in the area and it would have been widely known that he had died. That person provided an identity card which was photocopied and, I believe, a fee was paid, which is, I understand, the normal process. I repeat that there was no subterfuge. Every applicant has to provide identity which is photocopied. Further, I understand that the original document had to come from Chakswari and that there was a two or three days’ delay before it was picked up.



“If Naz Shah has any document then she should produce it and we will have it checked for authenticity with the Mirpur register office.”

Asked whether Galloway disputed Shah’s claim to have been forced into a violent marriage as a teenager – be that at 15 or 16 and a half – and was repeatedly raped in that marriage, McKay said: “In what sense was it a forced marriage? Her mother attended the marriage in 1990 as well as other family members and many witnesses did also, signing and giving fingerprints, so if it was forced presumably her mother and the others were part of that coercion?”

The government’s Forced Marriage Unit makes clear that parents are often the instigators of forced marriage, coercing their offspring to marry against their will.

McKay said that if Shah’s first husband had been violent to her, “then as a British citizen in Pakistan she could have jumped on a plane and left him behind, although I do appreciate that is often extremely difficult. If he was violent to her here – I’m not aware when they came back to Britain – then she could have gone to the police, social services, an imam or whatever. I am not aware, are you, of any such report by her to anyone, here or there?”

But he said Respect was in contact with Shah’s first husband, who has “strongly denied any earlier nikah” or doing her “absolutely any harm”.