A 21-year-old student required surgery after she was "nearly blinded" when a man with keys between his fingers punched her in the face on a London bus in broad daylight.
Karina Necula, a student at University of Greenwich, said her attacker bragged: "You think I wouldn't punch a woman?" before striking her in the eye, leaving her with a deep gash that required surgery.
The student was in surgery for a gruelling five hours and the attack has left her with lasting damage to her eye, My London reports.
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The young woman said she knocked into the man as they were both running for the bus in Brixton High Road, before he then "punched her in the face" while they were both on the bus on June 2, 2022, at 5.40pm.
In a state of shock, Karina ran off the bus to nearby H&M clutching her bleeding eye where a member of the public called an ambulance, who took her to King's College Hospital.
Doctors told Karina she had two fractured eye sockets and her eye was dropping. She told MyLondon: "After he punched me, immediately I started bleeding. I had my hands down to catch the blood.
"It only took paramedics about 15 minutes to arrive but because I had concussion everything felt like it was in slow motion.
"I didn't feel pain at the time, because of the shock. I was just crying and I could see blood everywhere. I couldn't see out of my eye. I was really, really panicked.
"I actually thought that the blood was coming from my eyes because he had a key in his hand. So it slashed underneath my eye but I didn't know if it went into my actual eye. So I was I was freaking out big time."
After eight weeks, Karina underwent a five-hour surgery to fix her broken eye sockets.
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However to this day, she is still left with physical damage - including 'monocular vision' where one pupil is bigger than the other.
A computer-generated image of the suspect has been released, but police still haven't caught him because CCTV didn't pick up the attack.
Police say they "remain committed to identifying the man responsible".
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