Egyptian Society Shaken by the ‘Husband Killers’ : Crime: In a country where many women feel powerless, discontent can lead to murder.

Nadia was left in the middle of Cairo’s sweltering suburbs at the age of 35 when her husband, despairing of a good job in Egypt, went to find work in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. She stayed home with the children, and gradually the only thing left of her husband was an occasional check in the mail.

Bored and lonely, Nadia started inviting a local taxi driver home for cups of tea. But it wasn’t until the night her husband came home that Nadia decided she could no longer live with this man who had become a stranger.

It was the first night of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, and Nadia’s holiday candy that night was more than sweet: It put the children, and her husband, into a deep sleep, after which Nadia and her new lover cut off her husband’s head, stuffed it in a pillowcase and threw it in the chicken coop on the roof.

When her teen-age son awoke from his drugged sleep and began screaming, they killed him too.

The taxi driver broke down and tearfully confessed under questioning later, the police detective who handled the case recalled; but Nadia, he said, was collected from the beginning.

“She was in full control. She was cool,” he said. “She said she had killed him only once. But he had killed her many times before. By deserting her. And by forgetting her.”

Nadia, who was hanged with her lover in 1991, was not alone. In the past three years, at least 17 Egyptian women have carried out frightful acts of domestic homicide--stabbing, bludgeoning, skinning, burning or dismembering their husbands, often depositing their body parts in black plastic bags in various quarters of Cairo and occasionally washing their entrails in the kitchen sink.

One Cairo housewife struck her husband on the back of the neck with a butcher knife while he knelt in prayer; two poured gasoline over their husbands and set them afire.

In Southern California, an Egyptian woman living in Costa Mesa was sentenced to prison earlier this month for killing and dismembering her American husband, frying parts of his body and dispatching others down the garbage disposal.

Filmmakers have begun documenting the phenomenon in such grisly--and hugely popular--works as “Lady Killer” and “Love and Revenge,” and columnists have taken to warning the Egyptian male against the considerable dangers of going home.

“Killing a husband is easy,” one columnist wrote in the daily Egyptian Gazette. “It can be done by putting poison in a nice cup of tea after a romantic evening, or by a normal kitchen knife while sleeping after a long, hard working day, or by a surprise blitz attack after a hot discussion. . . . Men are advised to take care.”

Alarmed at the growing wave of domestic violence, Egypt’s National Center for Criminology and Social Research in a recent report said that growing economic pressures “have brought to an end the mutual confidence and affection experienced previously by family members. . . . The squeezing economic crisis has torn the family apart and has left its negative imprint on society as a whole.”

But the growing number of attacks by women against their husbands also reflects the powerlessness many women feel in a society dominated by men whose laws often fail to give women normal legal outlets for domestic unease.

For example, like most countries in the Arab world, Egypt allows men to take second, third or even fourth wives, a recipe for turmoil at home in poor families because the husband usually must stretch resources to support the new wife.

In one case last November in the crowded slum of Imbaba, Soad Mohammed Othman’s two daughters held their father’s legs down while their mother and a cousin strangled him after he sold the daughters’ wedding trousseaux to support a new wife. Then they encased his body in concrete on the family balcony.

A progressive new law first adopted in the era of former President Anwar Sadat requires that a wife be informed when her husband takes a second wife, and it allows her to seek a divorce. But men often skirt the notification requirements, and the law imposes a difficult burden of proof on the first wife--to establish that she has suffered material or “moral” harm--to obtain the divorce.

In any case, women who seek a divorce often find themselves losing custody of their children and their possessions, despite laws guaranteeing custody and alimony to women whose husbands divorce them, especially since the law does not allow women to serve as judges in Egypt. In many cases, Egypt’s poor and traditional women find that seeking a divorce is simply not an option, even in cases in which they have been the victims of beating or abuse for years.

“This community with its traditions gives even educated and broad-minded men the feeling of a woman being an owned thing. She cleans, she sweeps, she takes care of the house, and the law is one of the reasons we have this situation,” said Inas Degheili, a Cairo filmmaker who has documented the husband-killing phenomenon in two recent movies, “Lady Killer” and “The Law Will Forgive Me.”

“In most of the internal problems in the house, you will find that the man always ends up winning, legally,” she said.

In “Lady Killer,” a woman who is the victim of a rape as a child and a sadistic husband as a bride ends up killing him, then going on a murderous spree around Cairo before finally facing the hangman’s noose. Her lawyer, who unsuccessfully tries to prove she was not responsible for her actions, approaches her sadly as she is about to die. “I’m sure you’re not the victim of one or two (men),” he tells her. “You’re the victim of a whole society that has no pity for the weak.”

At the Kanater Women’s Prison north of Cairo, an estimated 1,100 women clad in white head scarves and long white robes called galabiyas care for their young children, hang laundry on the prison rooftops and chop vegetables for prison meals. The “husband killers,” often shunned by their families, usually receive few visitors.

Wahiba Wahba Gomaa, 39, sits in the warden’s office and clutches a tiny gold heart strung on a black ribbon around her neck. Her eyes are rimmed in kohl; her red nail polish is chipped. Tears begin flowing down her cheeks as she recalls how her husband, a man she once adored, began bringing home prostitutes and beating her when she complained.

Turning to her family was not an option: They had never forgiven her for leaving an arranged marriage with a much older man to wed her second husband, an employee of the national social insurance department in Alexandria. The police were not an option: When she would complain of the beatings, they would either arrest him overnight, which simply unleashed his fury further, or fine him, which penalized the whole family.

“The man at the police station was helpful, but he said, ‘What else can I do?’ Going to the police was two problems instead of one,” she said. “I sat down with him and I told him, ‘Divorce me.’ He told me: ‘If you want a divorce, I will give you a divorce. But this apartment is not yours, this furniture is not yours, and you can’t have the children either. If you want to go, you go just as you are.’ ”

One night when he brought a woman home and began smoking hashish in his water pipe with her, Gomaa said, “I was close to exploding. I was boiling inside. I got up and grabbed him by his clothes and shook him, but of course he’s a man, he’s stronger than me. He beat me. The woman left then, and he went to sleep. And I made a decision that living with him any longer was out of the question.

“I waited until he was completely asleep. He was drunk, so he slept soundly. I went out to the garden and I got a hoe. I went in and I hit him with it on the head. He started making a loud noise, like snoring. The children were asleep and I didn’t want to wake them up, so I dragged him to the bathroom. He was still alive. I got a can of gasoline, spilled it on him and set him on fire.

“The fire caught. All his body was burning, and then he finally died. I was not aware of anything. Nothing at all. Up to the moment when his spirit went out. And I felt like my life came back.”

Gomaa, who is serving a 25-year prison term at Kanater, said she woke up the children and took them with her to the police station. “I went to the officer and gave him the keys to the house, and I said: ‘Go see what happened now. I came to you many times for help. See what happened now.’ ”

In another wing of the prison is Saneya Khalil Manaf, a thin, elderly woman who is serving a 10-year sentence for murdering her husband of 49 years on Oct. 7, 1990.

Manaf said she stayed with her husband for years, even though he continually beat both her and the children, because she wanted to make sure her children had a better education than she had. Years ago, she said, she took the children and went to her family in her village in southern Egypt, but she finally returned to Cairo when she realized there were no good schools in the village. Still, he continued to beat them. Often, she said, he would tie her legs to an iron rail attached to a stool and whip her legs.

Eventually, all of her children finished school. One of her sons received his doctorate and got a job as an engineer in the United States. And Manaf was left alone with her husband.

One day, she said, she was sitting in front of the house with him and she expressed the opinion that Muslims swear too often, taking the name of God in vain much more often than Christians seem to. Her husband, she said, erupted in fury, grabbing a hose from the washing machine and striking her with it.

“Then he picked up a knife and came toward me with it. I don’t know what happened. I saw the stool that he used to tie me to, and I grabbed it and I started hitting him with it, and while I was hitting him, I saw in front of my eyes all those years of suffering that he put his kids through and he put me through.”

The husbands’ families often paint markedly different pictures, telling stories of women and their daughters greedily plotting to take hold of property that under normal rights should go to the sons.

“Hatred, envy and selfishness: That is what was behind it,” said Mohammed Mahmoud Guindi, whose father was murdered last May by his stepmother and two daughters after he refused to transfer the family bakery to their names. “It is of course logical that behind every crime there is a purpose, and that was the purpose, to be in control of the wealth.”

At Cairo’s crowded Ain Shams University Hospital recently, 33-year-old Gamal Badr Eddin sat in a bed with large bandages around his neck, face, back and hands after his young wife--learning that he had recently taken a second wife--had tried to stab him to death.

His relationship with his first wife, he said, had already gone sour, but she refused to leave and caused trouble with him and his family. “I had lost interest in her. I wanted her to leave the same way she came, but she started sabotaging everyone’s life,” he recalled. “She even went to my new wife’s previous husband and family and told them about her behavior, ruining her reputation. She called everyone. She used the telephone like a terrorist.”

Once, he said, he woke up at 4 in the morning to use the bathroom and found his wife awake in the bed beside him. He asked if anything was wrong. “Nothing,” she replied quietly.

A few hours later, she woke him and took his pajamas, saying she had laundry to do. He went back to sleep, and the next thing he remembers is awakening to find her stabbing him, in the back, on the arms, in the throat.

“Her eyes were wide open. She was staring at me, and there was blood all over her,” he said. “She had revenge in her eyes. Love and revenge.”

His 3-year-old son, witnessing the attack, went screaming down the stairs to Badr Eddin’s parents, and his father, Anwar Badr Eddin, passed the wife as she ran down the stairs and out of the building.

“Her face was covered with blood, her hands, her clothes, like she had slaughtered an animal,” he said. “Thank God nobody stopped her. If we had known then what she had done, that she had tried to kill my son, there would have been a second crime.”

Gamal Badr Eddin, telling the tale, affectionately took the hand of his second wife, who had brought bananas to his hospital room, and talked about his wife’s upcoming trial.

“Most of the people tell me I should forgive--for my kids, because I was saved,” he said. “But the law will not forgive. She did not have any pity for me, for my kids, for my family, for anybody.”