North End stabbing trial: victim says attack motive was possible '˜revenge'

Footage played to a jury at Portsmouth Crown Court showed Diana Pranskuniene giving evidence from a hospital bed the day after the stabbing.

The 36-year-old had been transferred to Southampton General Hospital after the July 9 stabbing outside Barclays Bank in London Road, North End.

Her recorded evidence was played at the second day of the trial of Dier Mohammed, 43, who is charged with her attempted murder.

Mohammed, who followed proceedings with a Kurdish interpreter, denies the charge.

Jurors heard Ms Pranskuniene lived with Mohammed’s brother Hiwar Namiq and had become friends with the defendant’s ex-wife Khanim Hammed.

Asked by police why the defendant stabbed her, Ms Pranksuniene said: ‘That’s a good question for me as well. I don’t know. I didn’t do anything for him.’

She added: ‘I don’t know, maybe revenge, he thinks that if he’s going to harm me then, I don’t know, his ex-wife is going to suffer.

‘I can’t think about anything. I’m not in contact with him.’

She added: ‘So it’s just unbelievable.’

Describing the moments leading up the stabbing from the witness box, Ms Pranskuniene said Mohammed, of no fixed address, grabbed her.

Ms Pranskuniene said he fled when she called 999. The operator asked if she wanted to continue the call but she said no. He then ran back, she said.

‘There was a big bang that I felt,’ she said in the video.

‘I thought it was maybe a stone or something. Then this hot numbness went through my whole back and I felt it on the neck. Everything started to be blurry.’

Jurors heard how she could only take ‘small breaths’.

A member of the public came to her aid, but Ms Pranskuniene did not know she had been stabbed until she was in the ambulance.

‘I didn’t think it was a knife at all,’ said Ms Pranskuniene, who is Lithuanian.

Mohammed was later arrested in Derby Road, jurors heard on Tuesday.

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