An eight-year-old Yemeni girl has died of internal bleeding on her wedding night after marrying a man five times her age, a social activist and two local residents said, in a case that has caused an outcry in the media and revived debate about child brides. Arwa Othman, head of Yemen's House of Folklore and a leading rights campaigner, said the girl, identified only as Rawan, was married to a year-old late last week in the town of Meedi in Hajjah province, north-western Yemen. Othman said authorities had not taken any action against the girl's family or her husband. A security official in the provincial town of Haradh denied any such incident had taken place.

All rights reserved. The young wife posed for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah. Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening.

He made good money from a restaurant and butcher shop he owned. He lost his businesses, the family became destitute, he began abusing Nasrine, and they divorced, she says. As the fighting grinds on in its third year, millions of families are unable to make ends meet, and more than 3 million people have been driven from their homes, ending up in camps.

Yemen has no legal minimum age of marriage, and cases of child marriage are common: research shows that the average age of marriage for girls in rural areas is around 12 years old - and up to half of all Yemeni girls are married before they turn The Yemeni government has failed to take any action banning child marriage. By then, her father had passed away, and her mother is mentally unfit to help after years of enduring abuse herself.