Help me, I’m burning
Desperate cry of girl, 18, as she flees into shop after acid attack
SCREAMING ‘help me, I’m burning’, this is the moment a teenage girl collapsed in agony after a suspected acid attack on a bus.
CCTV shows the 18-year-old frantically scramble into a nearby shopping arcade, begging for bottles of water to wash off the corrosive liquid as concerned passers-by gather round.
Police believe she was deliberately targeted by a female attacker after two young women are said to have got into a fight on a double decker on Tuesday afternoon.
Mohammed Raffiq, 38, who runs a stall in Reliance Arcade in Brixton, South London, said the girl slumped to the floor by his chiller cabinet while desperately trying to drink from the water bottles.
He is seen handing her several as another bystander calls an ambulance. ‘She was screaming and clearly in a lot of pain. She grabbed a bottle of water and was squirting it into her mouth and on to her face,’ he
‘She was screaming in a lot of pain’
told MailOnline. ‘She said, “Someone gave me acid! Someone put it in my mouth!”’
The young woman then went into a nearby hair salon, where she desperately tried to cut off her hair doused in the attack.
Hairdresser Sabrina Belachew said: ‘She was in terrible pain. She was screaming: “I’m burning, I’m burning”.
The girl was later hosed down by firefighters before being treated in hospital.
The victim’s sister, speaking amid a spate of violent crime in London, told the Evening Standard she was ‘angry’ because ‘too many young people are being attacked’.
Police said the girl’s injuries were not ‘lifethreatening or life-changing’. Scotland Yard said it was hunting a ‘single suspect’, who is female, for grievous bodily harm in what it described as a ‘targeted’ attack.