Naomi Oni, the girl who was left permanently disfigured after an acid attack on her face in 2012, has accused police of incompetence.
Following former friend Mary Koney’s sentencing to 12 years in prison for the crime, Naomi was very pleased with the justice served, tweeting: ‘Nothing like waking up to a beautiful sunny morning accompanied with the well-earned feeling of VICTORY!’
However, she’s not best pleased with the Metropolitan Police investigation, saying that she felt she had ‘been accused of lying’ and that they were incompetent ‘to kind of accuse me of doing it to myself, when I’ve said somebody has followed me from my workplace to my home.’
‘When I was in court and I saw the CCTV footage, I just looked at it and I thought:“Well, you can blatantly see that what I said is what happened, so where did that decision come from?”’ she told the BBC’s Today programme.
And yeah, we totally remember one headline saying: ‘Did the acid attack girl do it to herself? Police probe Victoria’s Secret worker and seize her laptop’.
Naomi, 22, is now claiming that the police didn’t look at CCTV footage, lied about the footage they saw, or simpy didn’t look close enough to see a veiled woman – Konye – following her after she left her workplace at Victoria’s Secret in Dagenham, east London in December 2012, just before the attack. ‘I even got told that they watched the CCTV footage and they saw no-one following me. We’ve all seen the CCTV footage. There was a person in a veil following me. Why was this not found in the beginning? Nobody has answers to tell me.’
In court, the defence for Konye, 22, argued that Naomi had attacked herself in an attempt to emulate the success of Katie Piper, after reading about the TV presenter and model, who herself rose to fame following a frank documentary about her own experiences of an acid attack.
And there was proof on her laptop that she’d read about Katie Piper. Naomi says, however, and quite rightly: ‘If that has been found on my laptop, I don’t see what that has to do with someone wearing a veil coming to attack me.’
Police told the BBC: ‘All lines of enquiry were considered in the early stages of the investigation. The CCTV evidence took some time to collate and analyse, but then clearly showed a veiled suspect trailing the victim before the attack. Konye was arrested as the investigation progressed.’
Konye allegedly attacked Naomi because she had called her ‘ugly’. Ugh.
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Picture: Rex
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.