Nigerian Man Deported For Attempting To Marry A Portugese Woman...Sham Marriage

These pictures show police officers interrupting a sham wedding between a Nigerian man living illegally in the UK and a Portuguese woman.Home Office immigration officers swooped on the ceremony, which was held at a registry office in Harrow, North London.The man, 32, has now been sent back to Nigeria, and the woman, 22, is on bail until November 7.The photographs and footage comes after it emerged yesterday that one in five civil marriages in parts of Britain may be bogus. Some 15,000 such ceremonies a year are taking place simply to get around immigration law, estimates one of the country’s most senior registrars, Mark Rimmer.Last year the Home Office received nearly 1,900 warnings about potentially bogus unions.But Mr Rimmer, the chairman of the Local Registration Services Association, said that figure represented ‘the tip of a very large iceberg’. He said that in urban areas, up to 20 per cent of marriages are ‘suspicious’.He estimated that overall, 15,000 of the 173,000 civil weddings each year in England and Wales could be fake unions designed to evade immigration laws.culled*