A Muslim and Hindu who met at PUBG have been arrested after he entered the country illegally.

A Pakistani woman and an Indian man who meet and fall in love in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds face a harsh prison sentence after being caught in India. According to a report by The New York Times, the couple was arrested just two months after they started living quietly in the city of Greater Noida, him for entering the country illegally and him harboring a fugitive.

Seema Ghulam Haider and Sachin Meena first met at PUBG in 2019 after Haider’s husband moved to Saudi Arabia for work. They ended up talking to each other via social media and phone calls. “Sachin used to talk to someone late at night, till 2-3am,” his uncle Birbal Meena told The Times. “Later he confessed that he fell in love with a Pakistani woman and intended to marry her.

His family disapproved of his relationship with “a woman from an enemy country”, but the couple were still reunited in Nepal in March. After spending a week together, they returned home, but met again in Nepal in May. For their second meeting, Haider took his four children and, instead of returning to their respective countries, they all went to India. The couple and their children lived together briefly in a town not far from India’s capital, New Delhi.

Ironically, it looks like they were arrested for trying to make things legal. According to The Times of India, the couple went to a local lawyer to discuss their residency and wedding plans, but instead of helping them resolve their issues, the lawyer reported them to the police when he learned that Haider was Pakistani.

“I was surprised to learn that she and her children (three daughters and a son) were carrying Pakistani passports,” said the lawyer. “He asked about the procedures to be followed to get married in India. She said she wants to marry Sachin.

The lawyer asked one of his colleagues to follow them after they left his company. “When I found out they were living in a house in Rabupura, I called the police,” he said.

It reflects the state of relations between India, a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, an Islamic country. The two nuclear-armed nations have fought numerous wars since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, and tensions between them remain high. In recent years, India has been involved in increasingly harsh and brutal repression against Muslims.

Meena is part of India’s Hindu majority, but Haider is a Muslim, which may explain, at least in part, the very strong reaction of the Indian authorities to the presence of a Pakistani Muslim woman and her four children: The Times of India report says local police were assisted by The Uttar Pradesh Counter Terrorism Force is in the custody of Haider and Meena, and the country’s intelligence services are also investigating.

But it seems their love is real – or at least not motivated by anything sinister. Meena only earned about $100 a month at her (apparently former) job at the local grocery store, and police say she did not lie about her financial or social status or make other promises she could not keep, to lure Haider into the country.

“He knows he is not very strong financially,” said Sudhir Kumar, Rabupura Police Chief. “He wasn’t impressed by his work, but by his skills at PUBG.

According to a BBC report, Haider and Meena have been jailed for 14 days while investigations are ongoing and could face up to several years in jail. Haider’s husband, whom she says was abusive before he left for Saudi Arabia, wants her and their children to return to Pakistan, but the new couple have pleaded with the Indian government to help them get back together.

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