Transplant patient not suicidal, says doctor

THE French doctor behind the world’s first partial face transplant insisted that his patient had not tried to commit suicide before she was maimed by her dog - although a British newspaper said she had acknowledged it in an interview.

The contradiction is one of the mysteries surrounding last week’s groundbreaking operation that grafted a nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor onto the severely disfigured 38-year-old mother of two teenagers.

The Sunday Times reported that it had spoken to the woman by mobile phone from her hospital bed and that she acknowledged taking an overdose of sleeping pills during a fit of depression this spring. That night, she was mauled by her own Labrador, in circumstances that are still unclear.