First comes loves, then comes marriage – or so we have been led to believe. Whether it means biting into a poisonous apple or sleeping until your one true love comes to wake you up with a kiss, western women have been conditioned into believing they must wait for their prince charming to whisk them off their feet, fall deeply and madly in love, and ride off into the sunset. Wedding bells and animated soprano birds, possibly a well-mannered chipmunk or two, decorating the scene, naturally.
Exiting Walt Disney’s fantasy, across the globe 55% of the marriages that occur in the world today are arranged marriages, with regions in Southeast Asia reaching as high as 90%.
In refusal to be another statistic, a 21-year-old Pakistani woman living in a remote village, has been accused of murdering her husband and 16 other members of his family, including a minor. After being forced to marry him against her will in September, Asiya Bibi, repeatedly warned her parents that she would be willing to go to extreme lengths to leave her husband. Refusing to allow her to get a divorce, Bibi took matters into her own hands mixing an unknown poison into her husband’s milk.
Pakistani girl poisons 18 people to death for forcing her to marry someone. She's remorseless, says it's her right to resist forced marriage pic.twitter.com/GXw3T9OHWZ
— FJ (@Natsecjeff) October 31, 2017
Before her husband could drink the milk, his mother instead mixed the milk into Lassi, a traditional yogurt-based drink in South Asian countries. Serving the popular dish to 27 members of his family, at least 17 people have reportedly died, including the husband, and 10 more have been hospitalized.
District police chief Sohail Habib Tajak said a judge allowed the police to question Bibi for two weeks to determine whether it was her decision or her boyfriend Shahid Lashari’s decision to poison her husband. Extracting a confession from Lashari, he admitted to supplying Bibi with the poison. Bibi has refuted this accusation before the media, claiming that Lashari told her to poison her husband and marry him instead, but she refused on both counts.
Earlier this week, both appeared in court where Bibi admitted that Lashari had given her poison and that she had meant to kill her husband, but that she didn’t mean to bring harm to anyone else.
District Police Officer Awais Ahmad Malik said the kind of poison used would only be clear after chemical tests on the victims.
