Can you believe it?
This is not a work of fiction. It's not a Stephen King novel or the plot to the new hit show on Netflix.
This is how it happened. This is the story.
Arranged marriages are a standard practice in Pakistan, and there’s no shortage of stories about the extreme steps some Pakistani women will take to escape them and marry men of their choosing.
But few go as far as Aasia Bibi.
The 21-year-old woman tried to slip poison into her new husband’s milk and inadvertently killed 17 of his family members in the process.
Some of you might think about Romeo and Juliet at a time like this but that was "slightly different". That was two people sacrificing themselves for the sake of love. This was just a series of unfortunate events (no pun intended).
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.
Seventeen of the family members have reportedly died over the past several days, including one young girl, and the other 10 are still in the hospital.
Bibi and Lashari were arrested on murder charges shortly afterward. Neither had lawyers, the AP reported.
Photo's courtesy of the AP and Pixabay.com