Bangladeshi man sentenced to death for maiming 9-year-old wife

DHAKA, Bangladesh -- A Bangladeshi court sentenced a man to death by hanging for hurling acid on his 9-year-old wife, leaving her partially deaf and blind, one of her attorneys said Tuesday.

The accused, Swapan Gazi, poured a glass of acid on the girl's face and head after she refused to leave her parents' house for his, attorney Salma Ali said.

The attack happened in 1998 at a slum in the industrial town of Tongi in Gazipur district, 20 miles north of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. A legal aid and human rights group run by women lawyers took up the girl's case.

The Gazipur court also ordered him to pay $900 in damages to the victim.

The accused had pleaded innocent. His attorneys plan to appeal the verdict in a higher court.

Gazi, in his twenties, forced the third-grader into marrying him without her parents consent, in 1998.

The girl's father, a poor rickshaw puller, refused to let her set up housekeeping with Gazi, saying she could not leave her family until she came of age.

Marriages of girls under 18 -- and men under 21 -- are illegal under Bangladesh's secular laws.

But underage marriages are deemed valid under religious laws in the Muslim-majority country.

Most births go unregistered in Bangladesh, and poor parents often flout the law and marry off their underage children, falsifying their ages.

A month after their marriage, Gazi went to the girl's house and insisted that she come away with him. He threw acid on her when she refused. Neighbors who heard her cries caught Gazi and turned him in to police.

She received treatment in Dhaka, and later in Spain, for severe acid burns on her scalp, face and throat. She lost an eye and hearing on her left side.

Her parents left Tongi soon after the attack. Now 14, the girl is back in school, in the seventh grade, Ali said.

The trial took nearly five years to complete; Bangladeshi courts are often swamped with cases and long delays in hearings are common.

In 2002, at least 315 women and girls in Bangladesh were victims of acid attacks, usually committed by jilted lovers or angry husbands seeking revenge.