An Iraqi refugee married his mother

Nina Berglund:

An Iraqi refugee with residence permission in Norway married his own mother, in a desperate attempt to bring the rest of his family to the country. It worked, inititally, but now both he and his mother face two years in prison.

The bizarre story, reported in newspaper Romerikes Blad, started to unfold last winter when local police began investigating the case, several years after the man first came to Norway as an asylum seeker.

The man in question initially had been granted permanent residence permission in Norway for humanitarian reasons.He settled in Lillestrøm, northeast of Oslo, and then quickly filed an application with the immigration agency UDI (Utlendingsdirektoratet) to bring the rest of his family to Norway under terms of the country's family reunification policy.

He told the authorities that he had a wife in Iraq, and that she had two children from an earlier marriage.

The authorities accepted the man's claims and the documentation he provided, and granted all three permanent residence permission as well. They came to Norway, and all four lived in a flat in Lillestrøm for several years before local police began to be suspicious, mostly because of the apparent age difference between the man and woman.

"It just didn't seem right," inspector Jan Eirik Thomassen of the Romerike Police District told Romerikes Blad. The man had said he was 33, and his wife was 44. Police went to court to get permission for DNA testing.

Results showed that the couple actually were mother and son. Her two other children were the man's siblings.

The man ended up making a full confession when confronted with the DNA results. Both he and his mother have now been charged with giving false information to the authorities, which can result in two years in prison and deportation.

Bizarre!