Krishnagar, Oct. 16: A dagger held at her throat, a young widow threw a burly man off her and buried the blade into his chest.

Hours later, when the village in Nadia’s Plassey was wondering at the break of dawn how and why Akhtar Sheikh was killed, Firdousi Bewa stepped out of her home and confessed to the crime.

“We could not believe her words,” said the local panchayat member, Pundarikakshya Kirtonia.

Her late husband’s friend, Akhtar, 40, had promised him on his deathbed that he would look after her two children, now aged 7 and 10.

The promise, Akhtar thought, would give him the licence to cosy up to the widow. Police said he had tried to get physical with Firdousi, 30, on several occasions earlier, but she drove him away.

“A little after midnight yesterday, he barged into Firdousi’s hut. When she asked him to get out, Akhtar whipped out a dagger from his belt, held it at her throat and tried to rape her. Firdousi struggled with him, managed to snatch the knife and hit back,” Nadia superintendent of police H.K. Kusumakar said.

He let out a yell, rushed out of her hut and ran towards his own, 100 metres away. “But he couldn’t make it. He slumped on the dusty village road,” the police officer said.

During the incident, Ra- hul, 7, and Suchitra, 10, were fast asleep, oblivious of their mother’s fight in the next room.

Police said some farmers of the Kaligunj area, about 150km from Calcutta, spotted Akhtar’s body early this morning and called them. Firdousi had not tried to flee.

She was in the hut when the police reached the spot around 5am today.

“As we were standing around the body, trying to figure out how and why the man was murdered, Firdousi walked out and confessed to her crime,” an officer of the local Kaligunj police station said.

“She told us that had she not killed Akhtar, he would have raped her.”

Firdousi has been charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder (murder without intent).

A criminal lawyer said she could be sentenced to life for the offence, but not if the judge was convinced that the murder was in self-defence.

“Self-defence is a fundamental right. In cases of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, the convict may be sentenced to life imprisonment. But if evidence proves that the woman killed the man in self-defence, she may be acquitted,” Jayanta Narayan Chatterjee said.

Firdousi was today sent to a fortnight’s jail custody.

Before boarding the po- lice jeep in her village, she handed her two children to a neighbour and broke down.

Her husband, Anarul, a rickshaw-puller, had died of tuberculosis five years ago. Akhtar was a fellow rickshaw-puller.

Villagers said Akhtar divorced his wife last year and started living in with another woman.