Double blow for teenage wife

Extramarital relations made the husband so irate that he did not think about the consequences before making an attempt to force his wife to swallow acid.
The acid-burned teenaged housewife from Narsingdi now feels more helpless as her stepfather, principal of a local madrasa, is keen on accepting compensation instead of taking legal steps.
With her lips, neck, breast and abdomen burned, Jannatul Ferdous, 18, of Noapara village in Madhabdi is now undergoing treatment at the One-Stop Crisis Centre (OCC) of Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).
A Fazil student of Rupganj Kanchan Fazil Madrasa, she was married off to distant cousin Abu Sufian, an honours second year student at Narsingdi Government College, on February 7, 2006.
Earlier, a love affair developed between them when Sufian came to live at their house as a lodging teacher. But he also had a relation with one of his classmates.
"He was involved in that relation before our wedding," Jannatul told The Daily Star at DMCH, adding Sufian misbehaved with her whenever she raised the issue.
Her stepfather and uncle Moulana Abdul Hye, who married her widowed mother when she was three, learned about the extra-marital relation on August 3 and drove Sufian out of their house the same day.
"While I was sleeping around 1:00 that night, he came back secretly and called me out to a deserted corner of our house," Jannatul said while describing the horrific event.
Holding both her hands tight, he tried to pour acid into her mouth, she said. "In the dark, I couldn't notice he had a small bottle in his hand."
As she forced to free her hands, Sufian failed to pour the acid into her mouth, but the spilling liquid burned her lips, neck, breast and abdomen.
"I felt as if I caught fire and jumped into our pond," she said, adding Sufian disappeared immediately.
She went to a local hospital first on her own without wasting any time. The doctors referred her to DMCH where she was shifted the same day without any help from the family.
She met staffs at the OCC, a shelter home, legal aid and treatment centre, and got admission there and against her family's opinions, filed a case with Narsingdi police.
"He was so infatuated with that girl that he didn't want our marriage to continue," she said affirming her resolve to continue with legal procedures.
But her family is trying to convince her to stop moving further with the case as Sufian's family has offered Tk 5 lakh in compensation to settle the matter.
"We've started investigation and talked with the victim on Saturday," Jasimuddin Sarker, officer-in-charge of Narsingdi Police Station, told The Daily Star, adding they have yet to arrest the culprit.
"The victim's family is moving for mediation, but we won't stop our investigation.”