'Sham' bride and groom seized at altar on bogus marriage charges

A bride and groom were arrested at the altar on suspicion of a bogus marriage after a tip-off from the priest.

The allegedly fake couple were slapped in handcuffs along with their witnesses just as the ceremony was due to start at noon yesterday.

Officers from the UK Border Agency and police hid in the vestry of St John the Baptist Church in Tilbury, after Father Tim Codling raised suspicions. He played along, waiting at the altar for the couple to approach — but then the officers burst in.

The Nigerian groom and his 28-year-old Dutch bride, from Barking, plus two witnesses, a Nigerian man and woman, were all arrested. Another Nigerian man, believed to be the wedding "fixer", tried to escape by scaling a 6ft fence but was caught by police.

Mr Codling said he became suspicious after the groom supplied two different addresses on his paperwork. Both bride and groom also both spoke very little English, he claimed.

All five of the suspects were arrested on suspicion of assisting a breach of immigration laws and taken to Grays police station. Mr Codling said he suspected fraudsters might choose his church because of the area's growing ethnic diversity and good train links with London.

He revealed he caught out one couple because when he asked the bride to repeat the vows, he read out train station names and she parroted them back. "I just knew something wasn't right," he said. "So I started calling out the names of stations on the c2c line — Pitsea, Benfleet and Leigh-on-Sea — and the bride started saying them back to me.

"She clearly couldn't understand anything I was saying. I don't think she even knew why she was in the church."