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A JILTED lover plunged a 10-inch kitchen knife into his own eye when his girlfriend said she had cheated on him – then blamed her.

Brian Barr said he wanted to ruin his then partner Lisa Beattie’s life because she told him during a drunken row she had been with another man.

Giving evidence to a jury at Livingston Sheriff Court yesterday, he said: “I was embarrassed I had done it myself but, of course, anybody would be. She told me she cheated on me and it really p***** me off.

“That’s why I blamed it on her, only I shouldn’t have.”

He told their next-door neighbour, paramedics and hospital nurses she had stabbed him.

He admitted telling paramedics: “If I’m blind, I’m going to kill that bitch.”

Asked why he hadn’t changed his story earlier, Barr said: “I didn’t come out of anger right away.

“I was really angry for a while. I blamed her because she provoked me to do it.

“I got a big knife – one of the biggest I picked out of the drawer in the kitchen. I’m quite stupid, so I don’t know how big.

“We were shouting and swearing at each other and I said, ‘Do you want me to f****** stab myself?’

“She sniggered and said, ‘Go on then’, thinking obviously I wouldn’t do it.

“I’ve held my eye open and pushed it in right away, not thinking because I was drunk and that. Then I fell to the ground.”

He said the wound didn’t feel painful as he’d drunk so much booze.

He had downed a bottle of Buckfast, a bottle of cider, some Lambrini followed by vodka mixed with cider.

He added that, despite an eye operation to save his sight, he was blind in his left eye.

Barr said: “I can’t see out of it now and it’s squint.”

Quizzed by his defence lawyer Hazel McGuinness, he admitted he had previously self-harmed,

He had hit himself with an iron, smashed a glass on his head and broken a cup and dragged it

down his face, leaving a permanent scar.

Beattie, 26, of Livingston, denied striking Barr on the head with a knife to his severe injury, permanent disfigurement and impairment in January last year.

At the end of Barr’s evidence, fiscal depute Gerard Drugan said the Crown was no longer seeking a conviction.

Sheriff Susan Baird found Beattie not guilty and told her she was free to go.