A HUSBAND who murdered his wife in a frenzied knife attack after he was humiliated and ostracised by her family was beginning a life sentence last night.

Amir Shazad carried out the killing 18 months after he moved to the North-East from Pakistan to be with his wife, Nusrat Ali, following their arranged marriage.

Teesside Crown Court heard that Shazad never consummated the five-year relationship, was made to live next door to his wife, to sleep and eat his meals on the floor, and was locked in a room when visitors called.

The family also pretended the 30-year-old was an asylum seeker to keep his identity and relationship secret from the Middlesbrough community where they lived.

The court heard he snapped and killed Ms Ali because of the severe emotional stress he endured after the family snubbed him and told him it would be another year at least before his marriage problems could be sorted out by relatives.

James Goss, prosecuting, said Shazad, who was from a small village in Pakistan, killed his wife on the doorstep of her home in Lothian Road on August 17, before attempting to hang himself in his lodgings at the house next door.

He was saved after Cleveland Police officers broke into his home minutes after the murder and resuscitated him.

The defendant had lain in wait in bushes outside his wife's home before grabbing her when she left for work and stabbing her repeatedly in the torso and legs as she tried to fight him off.

Two passers-by intervened but ran off, fearing for their lives after seeing Shazad was armed with a kitchen knife.

Mr Goss said the defendant was interviewed by police when he was released from hospital three days after the attack.

"He was in total denial to police so far as the killing and attempted suicide were concerned. He denied he had done anything," he said.

Shazad, who worked in a cash-and-carry store, had been due to stand trial for murder yesterday but changed his plea to guilty.

The court heard that he married Ms Ali, a lab technician at Easington Community School and a Teesside University student, in Pakistan in 1999, after it was arranged by elder members of their family.

Following the wedding, she and her mother returned to England, but Shazad did not join the family until 2003, after he obtained a visa to live in Middlesbrough.

When he joined the family, he found his wife barely spoke to him, they were not allowed to live together or go out together in public, and he was not allowed to tell workmates about her.

Tim Roberts QC, defending, said his client was never told his wife was rejecting the marriage.

"He respected his mother-in-law and obeyed her wishes, even to the extent of denying his own presence in their home," said Mr Roberts.

"It is a key factor in all of this that the defendant left all of the arrangements to solve the difficulties in his marriage to his relatives, as required to do so. He followed the traditional processes that the matter should be resolved by respected elders."

Judge Peter Fox, Recorder of Middlesbrough, was told Ms Ali had sent an e-mail to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the time her husband was applying for a visa, telling them she had been forced into the marriage by her family.

She later told friends she planned to run away and start a new life in Bristol because she could no longer stand the situation at home.

A medical report presented to the court said Shazad had been subjected to repeated insults and periods of humiliation.

It concluded: "It would not be surprising for a man to crack under this stress."

Judge Fox passed a mandatory life sentence and recommended Shazad, who wiped away tears as he was sentenced, serve at least nine-and-a-half years before being considered for parole.

He told him: "Your high sense of family duty perversely and so unhappily led to this personal tragedy.

"You were caught in a cultural trap from which there was no prospect of release and which, throughout, you were consistently humiliated.

"You finally decided you would kill her and yourself. You achieved the former and very nearly the latter.