A MUM described herself as ‘shattered and broken’ by the acid attack on her three-year-old son, said to have been orchestrated by the child’s ‘angry’ father.

The child’s mother spoke over videolink at Worcester Crown Court yesterday about the alleged attack at Home Bargains in Worcester, captured on the store’s CCTV. She thought her son, screaming ‘I hurt’, had suffered an allergic reaction as a rash spread over his arm and forehead at the city shop on Saturday, July 21 last year before she called 999.

Her 40-year-old Afghan husband denies conspiracy to apply a corrosive fluid as do his six co-defendants. They are Adam Cech, aged 27, of Farnham Road, Birmingham; Jan Dudi, 25, of Cranbrook Road, Birmingham; Jabar Paktia, 42, of New Hampton Road, Wolverhampton; Norbert Pulko, aged 22, of Sutherland Road, London; Saied Hussini, 42, of Wrottesley Road, London; and Martina Badiova, 22, of Newcombe Road, Birmingham.

She said: “I was in shock. I was shattered and broken. I couldn’t understand what was going on around me.”

The woman said family proceedings involving her husband’s access to their children kept on being adjourned and he had made threats to ‘take the children abroad and have them killed’. Philip Bradley QC, for the father, asked if she was telling the truth. “Yes, that’s the truth” she told the jury.

Asked if she believed he meant those threats she said: “Yes I did.” The mother, who had previously left her husband, accepted she did not tell police or a solicitor about his threats.

She said this was because her husband had told her ‘police can tell me everything because I’m the father of the children’. She told the court if she spoke to police or a solicitor in Afghanistan they would contact her family. She told the jury: “Whenever he becomes angry he can’t control himself. Whenever he became angry I was worried and tried to keep quiet and and keep calm and make him calm so that he wouldn’t do anything.

“He told me himself whenever he becomes angry he can do anything. He would kill someone and not care about it.”

She accepted she took her children’s passports with her when she left him.

“I was worried about our safety,” she told the court.

The trial continues.