ALLEGED POISONINGS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20899, 13 December 1929, Page 11

ALLEGED POISONINGS

A SERIES IN HUNGARY. SIXTY WOMEN ON TRIAL. (United Press Association.) (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.) BUDAPEST, December 11. The intense land ambition' of simple peasants, who would do anything to obtain a small plot ou which to work from dawn to dusk, is stated to be the chief motive for a remarkable series of alleged poisoning of husbands, for which the trial of 60 women from the villages of Tiszakurt and Nahyrev is beginning this week. In most of the cases, after the husbands had mysteriously died, the widows, havmg inherited the land, married younger men better able to help in the tilling. Julia Sijj is alleged to have murdered her father, her husband two sons, and two brothers in order to get land. Another woman. Maria Szule, calmly confcsscu that she poisoned her war-blinded husband because he was no use to me. I married a younger man who can help me in the fields.” In some instances exhumation of the husbands coffins revealed jars of arsenic concealed beneath the bodies. The accused women admitted that they had bought the poison from a midwife named Marie Fazekas. When the police went to arrest her they found that Fazekas had forestalled them, and had hanged herself. , Some of the women nre almost primitive. They have never seen a train or an aeroplane.