OAN Staff Abril Elfi and Brooke Mallory
12:25 PM – Thursday, June 26, 2025
A 39-year-old British man has been arrested and charged after being accused of attempting to stage a fake wedding with a 9-year-old girl at Disneyland’s Paris location in France.
Jaskarn ‘Jacky’ Jhaj, 39, a British man of South Asian heritage, originally from Fulham in west London, was also previously convicted in 2016 in the UK for sexual offences involving minors.
Back in 2016, Jhaj was found guilty of multiple sexual offences involving two 15-year-old girls, grooming them under the guise of being a film producer. He was sentenced to four years in prison and placed on the UK sex offenders register. Since his release, he has also repeatedly breached a Sexual Harm Prevention Order and failed to comply with sex-offender registration requirements.
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His most recent arrest came after he organized a fake wedding on Saturday, in which a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl was featured as his bride. He reportedly spent over €130,000 ($152,196.31), using professional makeup and false identities to “rent” Disneyland-Paris in the early hours for the mock wedding.
The suspect reportedly used a “stolen Latvian ID” and he fabricated documents to book the event through Disney, The New York Times reported.
He is now reportedly being charged with fraud, money laundering and identity theft. Additionally, he’s under investigation as an “assisted witness” for corruption of a minor, though not yet formally indicted on that offense, according to The Guardian.
The Sunday Times reported that suspicions arose after Disneyland-Paris staff first noticed the child “bride” during the fake couple’s pre-scheduled wedding event — noting that she appeared “dangerously young,” and later alerting authorities.
Authorities soon uncovered that the wedding “guests” were all professional paid actors who were bused into the park for the occasion and given little information about what was going to happen.
According to Alexandre Verney, the assistant prosecutor for the département of Seine-et-Marne, the minor has now undergone a medical checkup and she was found to be in good health. Verney also told the media that four people were arrested in connection with the incident: the British “groom,” the child’s mother (a 41-year-old unnamed Ukrainian woman), and two other Latvian nationals — aged 24 and 55.
The Sunday Times also reported that the young girl’s mother and the unnamed 55-year-old Latvian have since been released from custody. Jhaj and the 24-year-old Latvian are still being held in custody over potential financial fraud.
Additionally, a report by the French outlet Le Parisien stated that witnesses had told authorities that they were “shocked” when they first realized the bride was in fact a child.
“We all thought we were going to attend a wedding,” one unnamed person said. “Everyone was stunned, no one expected it.”
“Disneyland did things very well,” another witness stated. “They canceled everything as soon as they realized the bride was a child. We were shocked to see that.”
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