Knickers in a twist: the case of the poisoned pants

Contact poisons, which kill through the skin, have a long history stretching from Greek mythology through to a recent, rather novel, modern attempt

There is a poisoning clichi(C) of a wife trying to dispose of a husband with a drop of weed killer in the soup, but a woman in China has given the herbicide poisoning plot a new twist.

The straightforward addition of the weed killer to food was perhaps a little too passi(C) for Mrs Zhang, from Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. She allegedly decided to soak her husband's underpants in paraquat herbicide spay. Once the poison had dried onto the cloth, she apparently presented the pants to her husband for him to wear on their daughter's wedding day. You may not be surprised to learn that the couple had recently had a row.