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Young mum set herself alight in ‘cry for help’

4/ 8/2008

A YOUNG mum set herself on fire in her back garden after a tiff with her husband.

But coroner Nigel Meadows said he didn't think 21-year-old Shabana Kauser had wanted to kill herself.

He believed she had been suffering from a degree of post natal depression and might not have been able to express it to her family.

Mrs Kauser, of Pencombe Close, Belle Vue, Gorton died from severe burns and smoke inhalation four months after having a baby daughter.

After the birth she had been "depressed and seemed quite worried" her husband Atif Hussain told an inquest in Manchester.

The day after the argument in March last year he was making Shabana a cup of tea when he heard her screaming in the garden.

He rushed out to find her engulfed in flames which he tried to put out with his bare hands.

Shabana told a brother hours earlier: "I am sick of everything, I don't want to live any more."

The court heard that she doused herself with a bottle of accelerant and set herself on fire with a lighter.

She died three weeks later in Wythenshawe Hospital.

Mr Meadows said there was no record of Shabana having sought help from her GP.

"I accept Shabana had come from a totally different culture and there may well have been a natural reluctance to discuss these problems.

"She may not have realised she was depressed and I think it was a spontaneous and impulsive reaction to pressures around her.

"I think she resorted to what would be to her previous culture something that was done.

"If anything it was a cry for help because she had no other way of expressing herself - and I don't think she had any understanding of the danger of using accelerants and fire."

Recording a verdict of death by misadventure Mr Meadows, said: "I made this decision not because I was concerned about her background Muslim faith - but on the basis of the evidence."