A 56-year-old Polish woman was arrested and charged with systematically adding toxic substances to a coworker’s drinks simply because she disliked them.

It’s unclear when the unnamed cleaning woman started poisoning her colleague, but the 51-year-old victim started feeling seriously under the weather a few months ago. At first, she thought her stomach pain was caused by stress and working too much, but as her symptoms worsened, the woman, whose name has not been revealed for privacy reasons, went to the hospital for a checkup. Doctors there told her that she showed signs of internal injuries similar to those caused by toxic substances and asked if she had been ingesting something that she wasn’t supposed to. She hadn’t, but the question reminded her of the weird taste she had felt when drinking her morning cup of tea at work.

Photo: Thomas Park/Unsplash

The 51-year-old victim worked at an office building in Warsaw with a number of other women employed by the same cleaning company. She had had some arguments with them over the years, but never imagined some of them would go as far as to try to poison her. Nevertheless, she went to a local police station to report her suspicions, but she was told that nothing could be done based solely on her hunches and that she needed to provide some solid evidence.

Simply having her Coca-Cola bottle and cup of tea tested for toxic substances wouldn’t have solved the problem, as she couldn’t prove who had been poisoning her, so she installed a hidden camera in her quarters on Myśliwiecka Street. It wasn’t long before she learned that one of her coworkers, a 56-year-old Polish woman, was spraying a cleaning agent and other corrosive substances in her tea and soda bottle.

Instead of confronting the perpetrator, she recorded the poisoning routine for several days before turning the evidence over to the police. They arrested the 56-year-old cleaning woman a few hours later, along with another 68-year-old woman to whom she had been talking on the phone while poisoning the victim’s drinks. The other woman confessed to knowing about the systematic poisoning but not telling the victim about it. Authorities are still investigating and suspect that other people could be involved.

 

Warsaw police have yet to reveal the reason behind the systematic poisoning, but according to sources quoted by Polish media, the two older women simply did not like the victim, who apparently had a slightly higher position at the company they worked for, and wanted to get rid of her somehow. “The women simply did not like each other,” the anonymous informant told Onet Warsaw.

The woman caught on camera poisoning her coworker’s drinks risks spending up to 20 years behind bars, while her older colleague faces 3 years in prison for failing to alert the authorities about the crime.