From a crime novel trope mastered by the likes of Agatha Christie to being the poison of choice in history’s most notorious killings, a Mumbai murder case brings fresh attention to the infamy of arsenic
The recent case of Mumbai-based textile businessman Kamalkant Shah, who was allegedly poisoned to death by his wife Kaajal Shah and her lover Hitesh Jain, has put the attention back on a classic murder weapon from a slower time. Claiming that they wanted to order bulk quantities of the highly toxic chemicals for their pharmaceutical manufacturing unit, the suspected killers obtained arsenic, apart from thallium, samples from a South Mumbai-based supplier and started mixing the poison into Shah's food.
Synonymous with a vintage poison slipped into the food of emperors, heiresses, politicians and popes down the ages, arsenic was not only crime fiction queen Agatha Christie's go-to deadly toxin (the prolific 20th-century author, who once served as a wartime nurse, had killed eight of her characters with the chemical) but also a trope of many murder mysteries of yore.