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Poisoned Slowly by the Fake Healer · Crime Night

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second. Yeah,
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: picture yourself in Minufia, Egypt. It's twenty nineteen. The sun
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: has gone down, and you can feel that heavy, warm
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: stillness of a suburban evening.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: You know that feeling. You can hear the sounds of
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: the neighborhood, maybe some motorbikes in the distance, the clatter
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: of dishes. It's normal.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: You're at a dinner table. It smells incredible spices, roasted fish.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: It feels safe, it feels like a sanctuary.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: But it's not the safety. It's it's just an illusion.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Sitting at the table is a man named Antar. He's
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: thirty three years old, a marble craftsman. I mean, just
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: look at him. This is a guy who holds granite
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: slabs for a living. His hands are rough, he's strong, the.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Kind of guy that called get us Solid unbreakable exactly.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: And he's eating his dinner, laughing with his wife, and
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: his best friend is right there with him. He thinks
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: he's just rehealing his body after a hard day's work.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: But he isn't refeeling. He's dying. And this isn't happening quickly.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: It's not a bullet It's a slow, agonizing dismantling of
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: a human being.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: The food on fork is a weapon, and the two
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: people passing him the salt are just watching, waiting for
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: the light to go out of his eyes, inch by inch.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: That's the real terror of this case, the.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Intimacy of it all.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're looking at a siege that took place over
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: fifteen days inside a home. It's a story about how faith, medicine,
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: and friendship were all twisted into a method of execution
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: so subtle it almost looked like an illness.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: It's the ultimate betrayal. You know, you lock your doors
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: to keep the danger out, but in this story, the
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: danger already has a key. So today we're unpacking the
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: slow betrayal in Minufia. We're going to walk through the
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: timeline of a murder that was designed to be a
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: medical mystery.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Okay, so let's start with the players, right.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: What are we talking about here?
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: At the center? You have Antar. He's a pillar of
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: his community, hardworking, very traditional, been married for eleven years
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: to a woman.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Named Suah, and they have children.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: They do three kids, though there's already this shadow of
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: tragedy on the family. They'd lost a child to illness
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: before this, and that's important. I think it establishes this
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: baseline of grief and vulnerability. And Atar is incredibly close
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: to his mother, Haga Sharbat. Now she is a crucial
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: figure because she works in the medical field. She knows
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: what real sickness looks like.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: And then there's the third wheel.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Mozad. He wasn't just a buddy. In these kinds of
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: tight knit communities, the line between friend and brother is well,
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: it's pretty much non existent.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: So he was family.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: He was furniture in the house, He ate their food,
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: played with their kids. Antar trusted him completely.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: And that trust that was the weapon. So while Antar
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: is out breaking his bag, Mosad and Sama, the wife
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: and the best friend, are starting an affair.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Right but this isn't your typical story of sneaking around.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: They were bolder. They wanted to carry on the affair
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: right there inside Ontar's own house.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: The audacity of that is just stagger it it is.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: But to do that they needed to cover story, a
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: really good one, and Sama came up with something that is,
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: frankly a masterclass in psychological manipulation.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: She played the supernatural card.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: She did She claimed she was bewitched. She told Antar,
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: his family, anyone who would listen, that she was suffering
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: from sorcery, some kind of curse. And then, and this
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: is the real twist, she claimed that Mosad the Marble
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: Worker possessed divine gifts. She convinced everyone he was a
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: healer who could perform quronic therapy, exorcisms, basically that he
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: could cure her.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Wow, that is incredibly dark because by framing him as
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: a holy man, she completely removes the sexual threat. Exactly
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: if he's in the bedroom with her, he's not a lover.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: He's a doctor for.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: Her soul, precisely, and it legitimized his constant presence. Antar,
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: who just wants his wife to get better, doesn't just
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: tolerate Masad being there. He encourages that. He's literally opening
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: the door for the man who was about to destroy
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: his life.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: So Mosad is there doing these sessions. But I'm guessing
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: little snippets of time warn't enough.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: No, they wanted to play house, but with Antar' stife
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: on it, and that leads to what you could call
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: the practice run.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: This is where it gets physical.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: This is where we see the move from emotional betrayal
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: to actual physical assault. Masad contacts a friend of his
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: in the medical sector and notice that the misuse of
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: medical access keeps coming up. He gets sleeping pills strong.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Sedatives, so the whole routine shifts.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: It becomes chillingly efficient. Masod comes over, Sama spikes Antar's drink. Antar,
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: exhausted from a day of manual labor, just passes out,
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: sleeps like.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: The dead while they're in the living room or the kitchen,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: just a wall away from him.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It just shows this profound sociopathic detachment. But eventually
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: the sleeping pills weren't enough. They were temporary fixed. They
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: wanted a permanent solution. They wanted Antar gone.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: I always wonder in these cases, why not just divorce.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you're this committed to the other guy,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: just leave.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: It's never that simple as it. Divorce in that culture
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: carries a huge social stigma, financial ruin custody battles. They
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: didn't want the mess. They want a reset button.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: He knew a healthy, thirty three year old man suddenly
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: dropping dead would look suspicious, very.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: There would be an autopsy, there would be questions. Yeah,
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: so they needed a death look like life. They needed
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: a slow fade.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Some Masad goes back to his medical contact.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: He does, but this time he's not asking for sleeping pills.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: He's asking for poison, and he specifically asks for advice
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: on how to administer it to simulate a gradual natural decline.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: So it's not a crime of passion. It's a project.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: It's a siege. They chose a slow death as a
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: camouflage strategy. They wanted to break him down so that
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: by the time he died, everyone would just nod and say, oh,
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: poor Auntar. He'd been sick for weeks.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Let's walk through these fifteen days, because this part is
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: truly a nightmare. The slow death begins at the dinner table.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: Samas starts putting small, sub lethal doses of the poison
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: into his evening meals. Now you have to remember Antar's body.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: He's a tank strong guy. So for the first two days,
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: nothing happens. Nothing, He eats the poison, wakes up, goes
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: to work. That must have been frustrating for them.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Or terrifying, wondering if the stuff was even working right.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: But biology always wins. By day four, the accumulation hits
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: a tipping point, Antar starts complaining of stomach cramps, but
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: the symptoms are intermittent. It comes and goes.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: It looks like a stomach bug exactly.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Sam is there playing the concerned wife. Oh maybe it
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: was something you ate. But by the end of the
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: first week, the mask slips. The poison is attacking his organs.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: This muscular guy's turning pale. He's losing weight. He is
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: visibly withering away.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: And Antar's mother Hugash Charbot, the one who works in medicine.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: She must have been sounding the alarm.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: She was frantic. She's calling the house constantly. But this
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: is where the gas lighting really kicks in. Sam becomes
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: the gatekeeper. The mother calls some answers. He's sleeping, He's
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: resting comfortably. She's creating a firewall between the victim and
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: any actual help.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: But pain is a lowed thing. He must have broken
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: through that at some point.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: He did. He tells his mother the pain is unbearable.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: She demands he see a doctor, and this feels like
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: the moment where the whole plan should have fallen apart.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: Right If he goes to a real hospital, they run
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: a toxicology screen, and.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: The game is over. Sama and Masad know this, so
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: they agree to take him to a doctor, but it's
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: a trap.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: They take him to a fake doctor.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: An accomplice, a person Mosad set up to pose as
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: a physician. Imagine the scene. Antar is weak, sweating, in agony.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: He's looking at this person for salvation, and the guy
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: examines him and just waves it off. What's the diagnosis,
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: stomach inflammation? He tells him, it's nothing serious, probably something
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: you ate. Take these pills, which were likely just placebos
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: or more sedatives.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: And rest and that neutralizes the mother's concerns completely.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: When Haga Sharbat insists on a second opinion at a
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: real hospital, Sama refuses. She says, the doctor said it's
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: just inflammation. We have his orders. She uses the fake
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: diagnosis as a shield.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: We're now at the endgame. He's been suffering for two weeks.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: He's a shell of himself.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: And they decide it's high to close the book. The
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: coup de grass. Mosad prepares a fish dish and he
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: laces it with a massive terminal dose of the poison.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: The idea being his body is already so weak, this
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: will just look like the final collapse.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly Antar eats the meal. He trusts them. Two days later,
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: his systems fail. He collapses. He's rushed to the hospital,
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: but he's dead on arrival.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: And initially it worked, It.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: Worked perfectly because of the fifteen day build up. The
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: story was already written. The community said, he's been sick
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: for weeks. It was that stomach thing. A burial permit
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: was issued, he was buried.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: It's terrifying how close they came. They're at the funeral,
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: the body's in the ground. Samahas receiving condolences. Mosad is
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: grieving his brother.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: But there's one thing you can't script, and that's human
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: behavior under extreme pressure. You can fake a doctor, but
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: it is very hard to fake the right kind of grief.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: So let's go to the funeral. The atmosphere is heavy,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: people are mourning. But Sama, she doesn't look right.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Witnesses later said she was too normal. She wasn't devastated,
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: she was managing the event. But the spark that burned
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: the whole thing down was a cell phone.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Antar's daughter, his young daughter.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: In the middle of all this chaos, the little girl
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: picks up her mother's phone, maybe to play a game.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Who knows and Sama, who should be consumed by mourning.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: She just snaps and explosion. It wasn't just put that down,
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: It was pure panic, a disproportionate aggression. She snatches the
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: phone back with a look of sheer terror on her face.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: And someone saw it.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: A close friend of Antar's. He sees this flash of
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: panic over a piece of technology, and he thinks, that's
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: not grief, that's fear. He goes and whispers as to
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: Antar's mother and.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Haga Sharbat, who never bought the inflammation story, whose intuition
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: was screaming at her. She locks onto this. She tells
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: the friend there's a secret in that phone. Get it, and.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: This triggers something straight out of a heist movie. In
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: this crowded room of mourners. This friend has to maneuver
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: close to Sama, wait for a moment of distraction, and
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: he does it. He swipes the phone.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: And even imagine the adrenaline he slips away, unlocks.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: It, and the evidence wasn't subtle. It was a digital confession.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: A trove of messages between Sama and Mosad, a play
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: by play of the murder. They talked about the poison.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: The dosages messages like is he dead, yet it was
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: all there. They go straight to the police.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Immediately, and the police see the phone. The evidence is overwhelming.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: They arrest them. But the phone was just the start.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: They needed the biological evidence to match the digital evidence.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Which means they had to exhume the body.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: They did, and this is where the slow death theory
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: was confirmed by science. When the medical examiner looked at
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: the organs, they found something terrible but fascinating. It wasn't
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: just that poison was present, it was the pattern of
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: the damage. How can they tell the difference between one
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: big dose and two weeks of dosing.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: It's in the histology. The microscopic study of the tissues
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: the organs showed damage at different stages. There was fresh
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: acute damage from that final massive dose, but underneath it
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: there was older scarring, older inflammation, cellular damage that lined
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: up perfectly with a two week timeline.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: The body kept a record.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: The body kept a diary of every single meal it
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: proved sustained premeditated torture over fifteen days. The biological evidence
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: overlaid perfectly with the text messages.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: That closes the loop. There's no defense against that.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: None Confronted with all of it. Their story just collapsed.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: The court saw the cold calculation, the manipulation, the cruelty.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: Both Sama and Masad were sentenced to death by hanging.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: It's just such a heavy case to process. The tragedy
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: isn't just his death, it's the method. He didn't die
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: in a fight. He died while being cared for.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: That's the part that's so haunting. He welcomed a healer
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: into his home who became his executioner, and his wife
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: she watched the father of her children suffer over dinner
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: for two weeks. The patience of the killers is what
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: stays with me. They didn't rush, They let him suffer
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: to save their own skins.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: It really forces you to rethink the dynamics of safety.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: We think our homes are these fortresses. We worry about
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: the stranger in the alley. But for Antar, the world
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: outside was safe. The danger was on his couch.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: And it forces you to look at trust. Trust is
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: a vulnerability, and Antar's trust, his egotted nature, his openness,
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: that was the very mechanism they used to kill him.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: If he'd been more suspicious, he might still be alive.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: That is a terrifying thought to leave us with How
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: often do we mistake the source of our pain for
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: a simple illness, never suspecting that the cure being handed
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: to us by those we love is actually the poison.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: It definitely makes you look at your dinner guests a
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: little differently.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Indeed, take care of yourselves, trust your gut, and maybe
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: check the text messages once in a while. We'll see
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: you on the next deep dive.