AFTER a trial lasting all week, a Bolton Crown Court jury took just over one hour to find Farnworth man Mohammed Ramzan, 32, not guilty of attempting to murder his wife Shazir.

Andrew O'Byrne prosecuting, told the jury that in a row between the couple at their home in Pansy Road, Farnworth, Ramzan seized his wife round the throat and throttled her until she fell unconscious.

She came round in an ambulance taking her to hospital more than an hour after the incident. Mr O'Byrne said Shazir Ramzan was a woman "caught between two cultures".

The daughter of a Pakistani family, she had lived most of her life in England and was intelligent and independently minded. After working for a period she had returned to full time education and was currently studying at Liverpool University.

However in 1991 she had gone back with her family to their native village in Pakistan where, at the behest of her parents, she had married Mohammed Ramzan. After the wedding her husband returned with her to Bolton.

The couple had a child but the marriage was not happy and they had frequent rows over money, Mr O'Byrne said.

Ramzan, a restaurant worker giving evidence through an interpreter, denied that he had tried to kill his wife. He said they were having an argument and she had come at him. To ward her off he had stuck out his hand which caught her by the throat and she had fallen backwards striking her head on the stairs and becoming unconscious.

He attributed a delay of about one hour in calling an ambulance to being worried and trying to get the assistance of a friend. He said bruises to his wife's throat were accidentally caused when he was trying to fend her off.

Cross-examined by Mukhtar Hussain QC for Ramzan, Mrs Ramzan denied his suggestion that she was a domineering person.

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