The ex-boyfriend of this young woman has been jailed for 13 years for throwing acid over her face, leaving her almost and horrendously disfigured.

Berfin Ozek, 20, thought she was going to die when she was attacked by ex-boyfriend Casim Ozan Celtik, 23, after their relationship ended.

Armed with acid, he told her that if he could not have her, nobody would.

When she survived and revealed that her ex-boyfriend was the attacker, he was arrested. He then reportedly bombarded her with messages of love and apology, begging her to forgive him.

The victim even briefly consented and agreed to withdraw the complaint, writing: “I am not comfortable with him being between four walls there. We wrote many letters to each other. I gave myself to him. I love him very much, he loves me very much.”

Following a massive social media backlash, she later realised she was wrong and asked her lawyer to restate the complaint.

As a result, her ex-boyfriend was sentenced to 13 years and 6 months in prison for the 2019 acid attack by a court in the district of Iskenderun in the Turkish province of Hatay.

Speaking after the court judgement, the victim said that she was sorry she ever considered he was truly sorry.

She added that now she is horrendously disfigured, constantly in pain and with only 30 percent vision in one of her eyes, she “wonders how I could have ever said that”.

She said: “It took me a long time to realise how wrong and unhealthy that decision was.”

The support she received from other people helped her to come to terms with the fact that she was in an unhealthy relationship.

She said: “It was a huge mistake I made at a time when I did not recognise myself. People who have experienced similar situations will understand, humans are strange animals. Sometimes you can be in such a state of mind and believe everything is beautiful that you could fall into the sea and hug a serpent.”

Speaking about her attacker’s imprisonment, she said: “Is this sentence the same as the pain I suffered? I couldn’t see, I couldn’t eat or breathe. I couldn’t even talk.

“Can he give me my beauty back? No. My eyes have gone, they don’t see well. One eye has about 30 percent vision. I only see blurriness, I can no longer read books.”

She added that she hoped her story would serve also as a lesson to others who were the victims of domestic violence.

She said: “Women in this situation like me sometimes see the abnormal as normal, but given time they can come to realise how terrible the situation is.

“The biggest duty here falls on mothers and fathers. Families should help their loved ones and not just the women, but also boys who become the men who carry out this abuse.”

She added that low sentences encourage crime, and that she now recognises it is the responsibility of all women to make men face up to the consequences of their actions when they resort to domestic violence and femicide.