Muslim woman (illustrative)
Muslim woman (illustrative)iStock

A man and twelve of his family members died as a result of poisoning by the man's wife.

According to a police report, the wife's family forced her to marry a man who they had chosen.

Asiya Bibi, 21, poisoned the milk carton in her home, but her 25-year-old husband, Amajad, did not drink from it right away. Instead, Amajad's mother used the milk to make a homemade yogurt called "lassi," and then served the yogurt to 27 family members.

Amajad, too, ate from his mother's lassi.

15 members of Amajad's family died as a result of the poisoning, and 12 are currently hospitalized.

Police arrested Bibi and two suspected accomplices, filing indictments against them.

“Police have arrested Asiya Bibi, a man and his aunt for being accomplices and charged them with murder,” a senior police officer said, adding that the poison was provided by Bibi's "alleged lover," Shahid Lashari.

Bibi at first denied the charges, telling the court that "Shahid told me to poison the drink. But I didn't do it."

She also said the milk had been poisoned by a lizard dropping into it, and told reporters that her lover had not been involved and that she had refused to marry him.

In March, University of Haifa's Professor Zeev Weinstock told Arutz Sheva that for almost fifty years, "we have known that men's violence towards women takes place in similar proportions to the violence that women use against men in intimate relationships" This is true, he said, "in almost every culture and society that we know, from traditional societies to liberal Western societies."

He also said that "for the same reasons that men beat women, women beat men. The results are different, because of the differences between men and women, and men's physical endurance - they are injured less and therefore arrive less to the emergency rooms."

Police say Bibi confessed in custody.