A WOMAN left scarred for life and almost blinded when acid was thrown in her face by her jealous friend says she has forgiven her attacker.

Naomi Oni had corrosive liquid thrown in her face by a woman disguised in a niqab as she walked home from a late shift at work to her home in East London.

The attack in 2012 left her with third degree burns and doctors feared she would be permanently blinded, The Mirror reports.
Chilling CCTV footage showed the 25-year-old being followed home from her job at Victoria’s Secret by a mystery woman wearing a veil.

Ms Oni told BBC documentary makers she saw “someone in just black and the person’s face being covered”.

“There was a very cold stare and I remember thinking, ‘Whoah, OK, just cross the road and go to your house’.

“Before I knew it I felt a huge splash and I immediately screamed.

“I was running down my road. I remember banging on the door, screaming “It’s burning, it’s burning, acid, acid, acid.”’

The woman, police later discovered, was Ms Oni’s supposed best friend Mary Konye, who Ms Oni had known since primary school.

Konye, who is now serving 12 years in prison for the attack, was allegedly jealous of Ms Oni’s popularity and bubbly personality and carried out the attack in a plot to destroy her good looks.

She even attended Ms Oni’s 21st birthday party — pretending she was a supportive friend — as police hunted the person responsible.

When Konye was finally prosecuted she claimed Ms Oni had thrown acid on herself to gain “fame and fortune” like British TV presenter and acid-attack survivor Katie Piper.

The 22-year-old Konye was caught out when she turned up for routine police questioning carrying the same handbag used by the niqab-wearing woman on the CCTV footage. Tests later found the handbag tested postive for corrosive liquid.

In the aftemath of the attack, Ms Oni needed facial reconstruction surgery twice to treat her horrific burns at a specialist unit.

Doctors had to use skin from her thighs to rebuild her face and from behind her ears to create new eyelids.

But despite being everything she has suffered, she says she forgives her attacker, who refuses to show remorse for her actions.

“I do forgive her. I owe myself the freedom to move on. But I still think she is a callous, vindictive person; a complete coward who betrayed me.”

Five years on, Ms Oni is says she is a shadow of her former self and admits to having suicidal thoughts in the months after the attack.

“I had no hair or eyebrows. My eyelids had been burnt off. I couldn’t recognise myself. A slab of my thigh had been grafted onto my face where my cheek had been burnt away,” she told the BBC.

“I just couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t stop crying. I looked at this vision of my face in the hospital bathroom and just slid down the wall.

“I didn’t feel grateful I was alive. I felt angry and thought: ‘What is the point in living?’ I thought about taking my life.

“But then I gathered myself. I imagined my mum’s face and thought: “I couldn’t do it to her. I couldn’t leave her.”

Ms Oni says she still has her down days but that she is gradually feeling stronger.

“If something catastrophic can change a life in a second, then great things can happen, too.

“After the attack happened, I thought no man would want me. What I’ve learnt since is that the right guy will see beyond my scars. I’ve become a better judge of character now.”