Briton arrested after Disneyland Paris ‘mock wedding' with girl, 9
A British man was arrested on Sunday after an alleged attempt to stage a mock wedding with a nine-year-old girl before a crowd of 100 guests at Disneyland Paris.
The man, 22, was allegedly the 'groom' at a bizarre staged ceremony at dawn on Saturday in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle in the theme park 20 miles east of Paris. The aim was to make a video for social media, he told police.
Disney staff intervened to halt the action and called police when they spotted the girl, a nine-year-old Ukrainian, in a bridal dress.
The organisers had booked the park — which is available to rent outside public visiting hours — for a function that they said would be a genuine wedding ceremony.
The 'guests' were recruited online through adverts seeking 200 adults and 100 children aged between five and 15 to play the guests at a 'rehearsal' for a wedding at Disneyland.
Video obtained by BFM TV showed about 100 seated guests awaiting the ceremony as a female violin trio played at dawn before a stage strewn with flowers. The event had cost the organiser €130,000, BFM said.
Alexandre Verney, assistant prosecutor for the Seine-et-Marne département, said: 'Four people were arrested and questioned: the groom, who was believed to be the organiser of the event and is presumed to be British and aged 22; the mother of the child, a 41-year-old Ukrainian woman; and two Latvian nationals aged 55 and 24.
'It wasn't a wedding but a staged wedding that was to be filmed with a hundred extras. They privatised Disneyland, claiming that it was a real marriage.'
The mother and the older Latvian were released after a medical examination of the girl showed no mistreatment or constraint.
The Briton and the other Latvian were held for questioning over possible money laundering and fraud offences, the prosecutor's office said.
Disney thanked its staff for their action in halting the event. A witness told Le Parisien: 'We were not told at any time that it was about a film shoot. We all thought we were going to part of a wedding. Everyone was stunned. No one expected this. Disneyland does things very well. They immediately cancelled when they understood that the bride was a kid. We were sickened by that.'
The extras said they had been driven from central Paris on buses at 5am and given pink bracelets with the names of the 'bride and groom' printed on them.
One of the extras, named Yeleen, who went to the ceremony with her daughter, said: 'I saw a little girl dressed in white. I saw her hair prepared with curls and a lady picking her up in her arms. At that moment, I was shocked. I realised when I saw the child. It was atrocious.'
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