CASE RECALLED

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 408, 15 April 1937, Page 3

CASE RECALLED

MME. FAHMY BEY’S SUIT. Wiidow Wants Share of Estate of Husband She Killed. Cairo, April 9. Marguerite Fahmy, the young Frenchwoman acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1923 of murdering her husband, Prince Fahmy Bey, is now suing for a share of his cistate. She ; s also asking for unpaid arrears of a promised income of £6OOO a year. Under Egyptian law a widow is. enitled to a quar-ter of her husband’s Thp qstatdi lefltj by Plriiice Fahmy Bey is worth £32,000 in English money. The Fahmy family refused to pay Marguerite a penny, and the native Courts, upheld them in their attitude. The case hinges on the question of her religion. Two years before his marriage Fahmy Bey placed ii.n estate of 3000 acres in Chancery, stipulating that £6OOO a year be paid to his 'Widow if she were a non.Moslem. Marguerite is a Catholic, but she was converted to Mohiammedapiem one month be. fore her marriage. She now claims that she changed her religion only because' her husband itold her he would lose his share of the family inheritance if he married a non-Moslem. She asserts that she was never sincere in her conversion, and. that, after marriage, She continued, with her husband’s approval, .to attend Mass and confession. Madame Fahmy Bey (born Marie Marguerite Alibert) met her husband while he 'Was 1 attached to the Egyptian Legation in Paris. He married her at 22, eight months before he was murdered in, tile Savoy Hotiel, London, on July 10, 1923. Fahmy Bey wias shown during the case, one of the most famous in English criminal history, to have been a moral degenerate. He had treated his wife in such brutal fashion that her life had been one long horror, land she lived in constant fear of him.