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A model who had acid thrown over her face in a gratuitous attack has told how she begged her mum to kill her as she lay in hospital horribly disfigured.

Katie Piper asked to die rather than have to go through painful operations and treatment to repair her.

But she changed her mind, and the 26-year-old has now told of her courageous battle to recover from the horrendous ordeal and the pioneering surgery that has got her life back on track.

Aspiring TV presenter Katie was also raped but has waived her right to anonymity so that she can raise awareness of the plight of burns victims during a hardhitting documentary on Channel 4.

When she saw her face after surgery she said: "I thought, 'someone's going to have to hand me another mirror because this one is totally broken'.

"Then I realised it was me. I wanted to smack it in my face and cut my face open and tear the whole thing off."

Only able to communicate by writing, she told her mother Diane: "Kill me."

The acid attack - which had been organised by ex-lover Daniel Lynch who had raped her - burned through all four layers of skin.Katie was blinded in one eye and has had more than 30 operations.

Surgeons at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in West London removed all the skin from her face and used an artificial skin before rebuilding it with grafts from other parts of her body.

She now wears a plastic pressure mask for 23 hours a day to flatten her scars and keep in moisture.

Katie had been dating Lynch when he raped her in a London hotel room in March last year.

He later called her to insist she visited a cafe near her flat in Golders Green, North London, which is when Stefan Sylvestre threw sulphuric acid over her.

Katie said: "As I came out of the door, this guy walked towards me in a hoodie.

"It hit like this side of my face and it was eating across my face and just like some contagious disease eating me up."

Lynch and Sylvestre were jailed for life.

Katie said: "I want to move on from my attack and I don't want to be a scared little child.

"I was a fun person. I had lots of friends.

"I want to blossom into a confident, able woman."

Katie: My Beautiful Face will be on Channel 4 on October 29.