A bank officer’s marriage was cancelled at the last minute after her ‘friend’ posted her photos on the Facebook account of the bridegroom at Karkhana in the city on Friday.

The bride’s friend, Azad, and his two friends, Venu Gopal and Vamshi Krishna, graduates from Malla Reddy Engineering College, landed behind bars and are facing criminal charges under Nirbhaya Act (Criminal Law Amendment Act).

The 23-year-old victim from Anantapur is a junior officer in a private bank in city having completed her MBA from Osmania University. She got introduced to Azad while pursuing her degree programme in a college for women at Begumpet through a classmate.

“Messages shared by them through WhatsApp and content posted on their Facebook accounts indicated that they became friends and moved closely,” Karkhana Inspector Y. Nageswar Rao said.

The woman maintained that she had refused when Azad proposed to her a few months ago. But they continued to meet now and then along with other friends. Meanwhile, her parents fixed her marriage with a doctor’s son from Nizamabad. The marriage was scheduled for Friday in a star hotel in the city.

On learning that her marriage was fixed, Azad began pestering her to marry him and continued to send proposals to meet him through his friends. While her family members and relatives were busy attending to marriage works, Azad, Gopal and Krishna barged into the woman’s house at Sikh village on Thursday evening.

“Azad threatened her parents to perform her marriage with him showing some photos he had taken with her. The trio fled when someone called up the police,” the Inspector said. Somehow, Azad managed to secure the bridegroom’s contact number and rang him up.

He later posted the photos taken earlier with the woman on the Facebook account of the bridegroom whose family members cancelled the marriage and returned to Nizamabad. Based on the complaint lodged by the bride’s parents, police registered a case and caught the trio.