A UK woman has avoided jail time after accidentally poisoning a neighbor on her 11th birthday. Fatiha Sabrin was among several residents of the Nida House apartment building in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets who began feeling unwell on December 11, 2021. Investigators found Jesmin Akter, 34, had illegally imported aluminum phosphide tablets to deal with a bedbug infestation in her apartment. The substance reacted with moisture, creating the poisonous gas phosphine, "likened to chemical warfare agents," which seeped into neighboring apartments, the Guardian reports.
Akter's mother had brought the tablets from Bangladesh to Italy, where Akter picked them up. A judge determined she then smuggled them on a passenger flight to the UK, risking a "catastrophic mid-air incident" and hundreds of lives. Back at home, Akter distributed nearly three times the amount of poison recommended by the manufacturer for use in commercial warehouses, per the BBC, then left with her family for 24 hours. She later said she was "desperate" for a solution to the bedbug infestation a landlord had failed to properly address, did not read the product label, and "did not know the produced contained a dangerous poison," per Sky News.
Prosecutors said the amount of phosphine that seeped into Fatiha's home was between 2.5 times and 26 times the known lethal dose. Fatiha awoke at 4am on Dec. 11 and started vomiting, the court heard. Her mother repeatedly called emergency services as her condition worsened. Paramedics said she stopped breathing at 3:30pm and was dead before 5pm, per the Guardian. Another child was hospitalized. Akter pleaded guilty to manslaughter by committing an unlawful act and importing a regulated substance. At Thursday's sentencing hearing, Judge Alexia Durran acknowledged she'd been "overwhelmed with crippling guilt." She was sentenced to two years in jail, suspended for two years, and 150 hours of unpaid work. (More manslaughter stories.)
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