Poison victim Lakhvinder Cheema (left) and alleged poisoner Lakhvir Kaur Singh

London, Jan. 7: This murder case has something of Agatha Christie, perhaps Silver Blaze from the Sherlock Holmes stories as well.

Man dumps long time mistress for younger woman half her age. Mistress seeks to poison ex-lover and his new girlfriend. Man dies a painful, writhing death from poison. It is touch and go with the young woman but doctors ultimately manage to pull her out of intensive care and save her life.

The reason for the alleged murder is as old as the hills – burning, seething jealousy.

What has given this case a desi twist is that the characters in this excessively British murder mystery are all Indian. And the poison, not easily available from Boots and other well known chemists in the UK, apparently was brought over from India by the alleged murderess from one of her holiday trips.

In the dock is a Punjabi woman of 45, Lakhvir Kaur Singh, a married mother of three whose husband, a cancer sufferer, is not much in the picture. In any case, he was abroad at the time of the killing.

The victim was 39-year-old Lakhvinder Cheema, with the nickname “Lucky” – inappropriate since he died in hospital on January 28, 2009, with an hour of eating curry laced with poison. (The stable lad in Silver Blaze was merely drugged when he ate the laced curry).

Lakhvinder’s girlfriend, Gurjeet Choough, is 22. She ate the same meal and is fortunate to have survived.

Lakhvir is charged with the murder of Lakhvinder, his attempted murder on a previous occasion as well as the attempted murder of Gurjeet.

“Perhaps jealousy, anger and revenge all playing their part, she decided to poison them using an extremely toxic and deadly poison, possibly brought especially from India,” said Edward Brown, QC, when he led the prosecution case at the Old Bailey in London yesterday.

Nowadays poison has fallen out of fashion in British murders except with Indian and Pakistani women who, in a number of cases, have gone back to India and Pakistan and collected whatever poison their local hakims were able to supply. Several years ago in the case of Zoora Shah, a Mirpuri woman in Bradford, the poison she got was arsenic, once a favourite with the English but now as out of favour as the brown football with laceups.

The last character in the latest drama has been identified as Aconite Ferox, Latin for ferocious, more commonly known as “Indian Aconite”. The plant, Aconitum or Aconite from which this is derived has a pretty blue flower.

To add a touch of colour to the tale, it has been pointed out that Aconite, or wolfsbane, was supposedly used by witches in the Middle Ages to kill their enemies. Scholars of the Harry Potter novels will instantly recognise Aconite features in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when Professor Snape uses it to stop Remus Lupin turning into a werewolf.

Like cyanide, it stops the heart and other internal organs from working, causing death by asphyxiation. Victims suffer severe vomiting, clammy skin, a tingling of the hands and feet and the sensation of ants crawling over the body. Breathing becomes slower and slower, stopping within as little as half an hour. Victims lose the power to control their limbs but the mind remains clear throughout, making it a particularly cruel death.

In Britain, no one thinks anything of the fact that Lakhvinder, at 39, wanted to marry a girl of 21. There have been many middle aged pop singers and tv celebrities who have gone for even younger girls.

Also unclear in this case is that why even after Lakhvinder had broken off with Lakhvir, the latter had easy access to the house in Princes Road, Feltham, and west London, where her former lover had installed his new woman. According to evidence given yesterday, Lakhvir went to the fridge, took out leftovers of a curry and laced it with the Aconite.

As Lakhvinder was dying he realised that Lakhvir had tried to poison him once before, on December 6, 2008, but on that occasion he had been rushed to hospital and had recovered after a week’s stay. Lakhvir had even accompanied Lakhvinder to hospital and visited him daily, hoping he “would see the error of his ways”, the court heard.

When he didn’t, she returned from a trip to India and acted again on January 28, 2009 – Lakhvinder and Gurjeet were set to marry on February 14, 2009, St Valentine’s Day.

Police found two bags of herbs in Lakhvir’s coat and in a handbag at her home in Southall, west London. They were found to contain the poison, the court heard.

“It is an ancient choice of poisoners but today very unusual,” Brown told the court. “It is an extremely toxic substance drawn from the Aconite plant of which there are many species.”

According to the prosecution counsel, Lakhvinder and Gurjeet had been “looking forward to a long and happy life together”. “That future happiness was cut short in a most terrible and cruel way. It was their very happiness and their intended future together that brought about the devastation that came to bear down upon them at the hands of Lakhvir Singh. She had been Mr Cheema’s long term lover and it was his decision to marry Miss Choough that caused the defendant to act in the way that she did. The poison was disguised and sprinkled into a curry that the couple were to eat.”