Kate Knight, 28, had hoped to gain £250,000 (S$705,000) in insurance money by killing her husband, who came out of a 16-week coma after the poisoning attempt which also left him with severe kidney and brain damage and partially paralysed.

Knight, who stood shaking her head and weeping in the dock at Stafford Crown Court on Tuesday as the jury delivered its verdict after a three-week trial, had denied lacing her factory worker husband's red wine and curry with antifreeze in 2005 on their seventh wedding anniversary.

The jury took almost nine hours to find her guilty of attempted murder.

Knight, the mother of a nine-year-old boy, set out to murder Lee Knight, 37, in 2005 to claim his life insurance after she took out bank loans and remortgaged the family home and was unable to repay her debts, said a report in the Times of London.

Police said Knight had accumulated the debts without her husband's knowledge.

She researched the toxic effects of the antifreeze, which contains the poisonous chemical ethylene glycol, and had hoped to cause him to have kidney failure and a heart attack, which would have killed him.

After her husband complained of a 'tinny' taste in the takeaway curry they had bought to celebrate their wedding anniversary, she fed him the poison in red wine, which masked the taste and nearly succeeded in killing him.

Mr Knight was admitted to hospital in April 2005 and spent 16 weeks in a coma before he woke to be told by his mother what his wife had done.

Mr Knight, who now lives with his parents and his son, said the incident had left his life in ruins as he had lost all his independence.

'I realised that my wife had left me - lost my job, my house, everything I worked for,' he said in a statement.

The detective in charge of the case, Mr Martin Smith, said: 'Her cowardly crime almost caused the death of Lee Knight whose blindness is a life sentence in itself.'

REUTERS