Nujood's parents say they were trying to do what was best for their daughter and didn't even receive a dowry, a claim many Yemenis don't believe. The parents say the groom had promised he wouldn't have sex with her until she reached puberty.
"We asked him to raise her," said Shuaieh, the girl's mother.
The groom has disputed that claim.
Ahdal, in his mid-40s, says he wanted Nujood to avoid the fate of two of his older sisters. One was kidnapped by a rival clan and another wound up in jail for trying to defend her, an example of the murky intertribal disputes that bedevil Yemen.
"I was trying to protect her," Ahdal says during an interview in his family's decrepit two-room flat on the capital's outskirts.
Nujood looked forward to getting married, not understanding what it really meant. Aside from being a pre-adolescent bride, she is a fairly typical little girl. She likes playing hide-and-seek and tug-of-war with her friends and siblings. Her favorite colors are red and yellow, she says, and her favorite flavors are chocolate and coconut. She loves dogs and cats and dreams of being a turtle so she could swim in the sea.
"I've never seen the sea," she says.
About 40 people attended the wedding in the village of Wadi Laa, where the groom lived. As a wedding gift, she received three new dresses and a $20 wedding ring. She was to live with him and his family.
The trouble started on the first night, when he demanded that they share a mattress. She resisted, walking out of the room, only to have him follow. Sometimes he beat her into submission. For weeks, she cried all day and dreaded the nights, when he would enter the room, blow out the oil lamp and demand sex.
"I asked him not to sleep next to me," she recalls. "He told me, 'No, we sleep together in the same room. Your father agreed to accept me as a husband.' "
On a visit weeks later to her parents' house in the capital, she wept, saying that her husband was doing unmentionable things to her.
Her father said there was nothing he could do.
"My cousins would have killed me if I dishonored the family by asking for a divorce," he said.
But her mother's sister discreetly advised her to go to court.
The bewildered judge who found Nujood on the bench decided to bring her to his house for the weekend. His daughters had a swing and toys she'd never seen. They had satellite television, and for three days she feasted on cartoons.
