Woman Blinded by Spurned Man Invokes Islamic Retribution

Bahrami remembers a crowd gathering around her. "A bystander came with a jerry can of water. I splashed it on my face, but that only caused the acid to run down my arms onto my body."

Someone picked her up and took her to a nearby hospital. The doctors ordered a worker to hose her down in the hospital's courtyard.

"They didn't take her clothes off or wash her eyes properly. That could have softened the high degree of burns," said Farid Karimian, an Iranian ophthalmologist who began treating Bahrami a couple of days later. "She was a real mess."

Movahedi turned himself in to police two weeks after the attack. During a preliminary hearing, he acknowledged attacking Bahrami and was imprisoned to await trial.

"What was my sin? To want to choose freely in marriage?" Bahrami said. "What was he thinking?"

Bahrami was transferred to a burn unit at another hospital, where she had several surgeries over the next six months.

"All the time I had to sleep standing up. I was completely blinded," she said.

After the operations, doctors referred her to an eye clinic in Barcelona for a last attempt to restore some of her vision.

But Bahrami had no insurance. Iran's president at the time, Mohammad Khatami, who had heard Bahrami's story through her attorney, personally paid a large portion of her bills and promised that the government would make the remaining payments.

" 'You don't worry about anything; we'll take care of you,' they said," Bahrami recalled.

Doctors at Barcelona's Instituto de Microcirugia Ocular, an eye surgery hospital, were impressed by Bahrami. "She was an amazing patient. So brave. She came to a foreign country, blind, without knowing the language. She only wanted one thing: to be able to see again," said Ramón Medel, an eyelid surgeon at the hospital.

Medel and other doctors focused on Bahrami's right eye, which was less damaged.