Hyderabad, Aug. 31: A man who locked up his wife in a room for three years and made her drink her own urine for opposing his bigamy has been arrested.

Thirty-five-year-old Asha Begum, wife of construction foreman Mohammed Shadulla, said she was chained and held captive in the window-less room for opposing her husband’s extra-marital relations with Noorie Begum, a relative’s daughter who had come to live with them.

“Shadulla convinced his neighbours that his wife Asha Begum became mentally imbalanced after the death of their second daughter and had been sent away to a dargah in Nellore to be cured,” Begumpet police inspector Subbarami Reddy said today.

But Asha was chained and kept in an isolated room within the same house and was not even allowed to speak to her children.

“He kept me chained, (and) gave food through a hole in the door. He did not allow me to come out even to use the toilet and made me drink urine,” said an undernourished and thin Asha at the police station yesterday evening.

“When I fell sick, tablets were thrown into the room. I had to make do with only three saris and two other clothes for three years,” she added.

Asha said she managed to escape when the door of her room was kept ajar for cleaning up while Shad-ulla was away. “I fought with the other woman who tried to stop me.”

The other woman, Noorie Begum, a 26-year-old schoolteacher and second wife of Shadulla, is absconding.

The police said Shadulla, who hails from Latur in Maharashtra, had been liv- ing in the Bhai Patel Nagar locality with his family of three daughters and a son since 1995.

He developed intimacy with the schoolteacher who came to live with them from Latur for a few days after she was transferred to a local school about three years ago.

“He had kept me in captivity to hush up the affair,” Asha said.

She also claimed that her husband had killed their eight-year-old second daughter Reshma for telling her about Shadulla’s illicit relationship with the woman.

The police said Shadulla had confessed to chaining and holding his wife captive but not killing his daughter.