After a 21-year-old Pakistani woman was forced by her family to marry a relative, she and her boyfriend plotted to poison her new husband with a tainted glass of milk. But the plan backfired, and she accidentally killed 17 relatives instead.
Before her arranged marriage in September, she had begged her parents to cancel the wedding, and said she'd do anything to get out of it. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to her parents, that included murder.
According to The Washington Post:
Desperate to get out of the arrangement, Bibi went to her boyfriend, Shahid Lashari, who gave her a “poisonous substance,” local police chief Sohail Habib Tajak told the AP.
Last week, Tajak said, Bibi mixed the poison in milk and gave it to her husband, but he refused to drink it.
At some point after — and it’s not exactly clear how — Bibi’s mother-in-law used the tainted milk to make lassi, a yogurt-based drink popular in South Asia. When she served it to 27 members of her extended family, all of them lost consciousness and were hospitalized.
Over the last few days, 17 of those poisoned have died, including a young girl, and 10 are still in the hospital. Bibi and her boyfriend have been arrested on murder charges.
More and more Pakistani women are rejecting forced marriages in Pakistan in order to marry someone they choose, and are willing to risk everything in the process.
