Man kills wife over plate of pasta in Egypt

Dubai: An Egyptian court has sentenced a 23-year-old man to seven years in prison for the killing of his 14-year-old wife, Faten Zaki, whose death, after a dispute over a plate of pasta, shocked the country and reignited anger over child marriage and lenient sentencing in cases of gender-based violence, local media reported. 

The verdict, issued on October 13 by the Tanta Criminal Court in northern Egypt, is the final ruling in what became known in the local media as the “Pasta Plate Girl” case. 

Earlier this year, the court had referred the husband’s file to the Grand Mufti, Egypt’s top religious authority, for a legal opinion on imposing the death penalty. 

The prosecution had accused him of premeditated murder for brutally assaulting his underage wife after she ate a plate of pasta without his permission.

The incident dates back to August 2024, when Zaki, reportedly hungry and alone at home in the village of Kafr Yaqub, ate from a dish before her husband and his family returned. 

Upon discovering this, her husband, a 23-year-old tuk-tuk driver, attacked her with shocking cruelty. He allegedly beat her with a thick wooden stick, burned her with a hot iron, and struck her repeatedly on the head before dragging her to the roof of their building and throwing her off it. She succumbed to her injuries hours later in hospital.

Zaki’s marriage, reportedly arranged by her family to ease financial pressures, exposed her to a cycle of poverty, forced marriage, and abuse that ended in her death.

Women’s rights advocates condemned the reduction of the sentence to seven years, calling it another example of judicial leniency under Article 17 of the Egyptian Penal Code, which allows judges to lower penalties if they deem circumstances “mitigating.”

The verdict drew comparisons to another high-profile case decided earlier this year, when a court sentenced Motaz Hendawy, convicted of killing his wife Maram Osama, to seven years in prison instead of life or death. Osama, a 32-year-old mother of two, died in December 2024 after being strangled and left untreated for five days.