Egyptian groom pranks bride with fake Isis kidnap

Twenty-five-year-old medical graduate, Ahmed Shehata, in an attempt to surprise his bride and their guests, arranged for relatives to dress up as Isis militants and pretend to kidnap his new wife at their wedding this week.

 

While fear would have been a common response to the recent terror attacks by the Islamic State (Isis), one Egyptian groom chose to laugh in the face of adversity.

Twenty-five-year-old medical graduate, Ahmed Shehata, in an attempt to surprise his bride and their guests, arranged for relatives to dress up as Isis militants and pretend to kidnap his new wife at their wedding this week.

The masked men were ushered in with the soundtrack of the notorious Isis anthem, and strong-armed Shaimaa Deif, a 23-year-old medical graduate, alongside Shehata into a cage reminiscent of the one in which a Jordanian pilot was burned alive last month.

Speaking to the Guardian after a video of the bizarre incident went viral in Egyptian social media, Deif said: "I knew there would be a surprise, but I never imagined that the surprise would be like that."

Her initial panic soon turned into amusement after the music merged into a dance-track, one of the masked men revealed himself to be her brother, and it turned out the groom had been in on the stunt all along.

Deif admitted that she hadn't expected the dark cloth she gave her fiance in the run-up to the wedding to be used to make fake Isis masks: "I thought it was for something romantic," she said.

She also argued that the prank sent a strong message to Isis. Addressing the transnational jihadi movement, Deif said: "The cage you're scaring us with, we are dancing inside it."

However, some Egyptians didn't find the prank funny at all, arguing that it was in poor taste given the recent massacre of 21 Egyptians in Libya, and also the murder of several more on Egyptian soil by unknown perpetrators this week.

But Deif argued: "We aren't making light of other people's blood. We're showing that we're not scared, and that Egyptians meet any crisis with laughter and comedy."