Abandoned by her sons, shunned by her neighbors and branded a witch.

Mosammat Rashida’s crime? Her husband was killed by a Bengal tiger.

Women like her are ostracized in many rural villages in Bangladesh, where they are viewed as the cause of their partner’s misfortune.

“My sons have told me that I am an unlucky witch,” she told AFP in her flimsy plank home, in the honey-hunters’ village of Gabura at the edge of the Sundarbans — a 10,000-square-kilometre (3,860-square-mile) mangrove forest that straddles Bangladesh and India.

Her husband died while out collecting honey in the jungles there.

“Honey-hunters prefer to collect honey mostly in the southwestern Sundarbans, where most of the man-eaters (tigers) live,” leading Bengal tiger expert at Jahangirnagar University, Monirul Khan, told AFP.