A HUSBAND who murdered his wife in a frenzied knife attack after he was humiliated and ostracised by her family was beginning a mandatory 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, after their arranged marriage.

Teesside Crown Court heard Shazad, 30, never consummated the relationship. He was also made to live next door to his wife, to sleep and eat his meals on the floor, and was shut in a room when visitors called.

The court heard he snapped and killed Ms Ali because of emotional stress after the family, who pretended he was an asylum seeker, 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 killed his wife outside her home in Lothian Road on August 17, before trying to hang himself in his lodgings at the house next door, but police broke in and saved him.

The defendant had lain in wait outside his wife's home before grabbing her when she left for work and stabbing her repeatedly.

Two passers-by intervened but ran off after seeing Shazad had a knife.

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 he married Ms Ali, a lab technician at Easington Community School and a Teesside University student, in Pakistan in 1999.

Following the wedding, she returned to England, but Shazad did not join the family until 2003, when 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: "He respected his mother-in-law and obeyed her wishes, even to the extent of denying his own presence in their home."

Ms Ali sent an e-mail to the Foreign Office when her husband applied for a visa, telling them she had been forced into the marriage. She later told friends she planned to run away.

A medical report 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 Peter Fox, Recorder of Middlesbrough, recommended Shazad serve at least nine-and-a-half years. He said: "You were caught in a cultural trap from which there was no prospect of release and which, throughout, you were consistently humiliated."