Defence witnesses to testify in ‘birth certificate forgery’ case

Defence witnesses will testify on September 28, 2019, in a forgery case involving a Bahraini man, his mother and second wife. The trio are accused of falsifying the birth certificate of a girl child and they were put on trial after their act was exposed by the first wife, an Arab national, after she got separated from him. 

It’s said that the Bahraini man was married to both women at the time the girl was born, but his marriage contract tying him to the second woman (the mother of the girl) wasn’t officially registered. Therefore, he resorted to registering his first wife as the biological mother of the girl to avoid further complications, according to prosecutors.  

However, it was done without the approval of the first wife, who launched a complaint against her ex-husband with the police. She told police officers that the Bahraini man had been beating her regularly as well as insulting her. A DNA test was conducted to approve her claims and it was found out that she wasn’t the biological mother of the child, confirming her allegations that her then-husband provided false information when registering the birth of the child. “I got married to him in 2016 and were trying to register the marriage in my country,” the second wife, aged 27, told prosecutors when she was summoned for questioning.

“I got pregnant and Salmaniya Medical Complex refused to admit me because I didn’t have a certified marriage contract. “I contacted my father and he informed me that I had to go with my husband to my country to complete the formalities. “That wasn’t possible because I was already on my seventh month of pregnancy and airlines refused to allow me to travel,” the 27-year-old added. The pair didn’t have an option but to have the the first wife recorded as the biological mother of the child and the father’s mother signed as a witness.

However, the second wife told prosecutors that the first wife was the one who offered her this plan and help. The mother, meanwhile, told prosecutors that the papers were written in English and she didn’t understand anything. “I was only asked to sign and thought that was for the approval of conducting the surgery to take the child out,” she said. The trio were charged with forgery.