PUL-I-KUMRI, Afghanistan — Zahra said a neighbor raped her in her home on Friday. It was the most humiliating event in her unremittingly painful life, and the next day she begged her husband, Najibullah, to move their family so the man could not attack her again. He refused.

On Sunday afternoon, she poured kerosene over Najibullah and lit him on fire.

“I stepped back and watched him burn,” Zahra said. “I thought, ‘Someone is going to die, and it is going to be him or it is going to be me.’ ”

Since then, she has been held at the women’s shelter here as investigators try to sort out the facts of the case. For his part, Najibullah, in a brief interview with a reporter at the hospital here, said that he believed she had attacked him because she was mentally ill. But his condition was still too poor for prosecutors to fully question him.

Her violent act has unexpectedly brought quiet expressions of support from other Afghan women, some of whom say they are fed up with lives of abuse with no recourse. And it immediately evoked a morbid fascination in the Afghan news media; on Monday, local reporters unabashedly walked into the hospital where Zahra’s husband is being treated for first- and second-degree burns, peering into rooms and asking doctors, “Where is the man who was set on fire by his wife?”