Twenty-four-year-old Barbara Riouall had her throat slashed and her larynx severed in the attack near Christ Church. The honours marketing student at Dublin Business School (DBS) would have bled to death at the scene of the attack without the intervention of a nurse who found her in a pool of blood. The unprovoked attack occurred in the inner courtyard of her accommodation complex, at Bertram Court, on 10 May 2005. Gardai were initially mystified as to the motive for the assault.

The young woman later left Ireland and vowed never to return, despite having just 10 weeks remaining in her threeyear college course to obtain her qualification. However, speaking to the Sunday Tribune last week, the victim's father, a Marseilles-based physician, said that his daughter would certainly return to Ireland to give evidence in any subsequent trial. "Barbara is well. She will go to Ireland if the time comes for any court event, or trial, " Dr Riouall said.

During her treatment at St James's Hospital in Dublin after the brutal attack, the young woman could not bear to have her father leave her bedside. Such was the ferocity of the stab wounds that an emergency tracheotomy was performed by a team of doctors who cut open her windpipe in the fear that excess blood and swelling from her injuries would lead her to suffocate.

The young student could not speak to interviewing gardai and was initially only able to provide them with information by typing it onto a laptop computer which detectives brought into the hospital.