A pregnant woman was stabbed multiple times in the middle of a busy high street in broad daylight – then found out who was responsible for the frenzied and shocking attack.
At the time of the incident, Natalie Queiroz was eight months pregnant with a baby girl and looking forward to an exciting future with her fiancé Babur ‘Bobby’ Raja. But on a rainy day in March 2016, she was heading into the town centre of Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, for a spot of shopping when her life changed forever.
Natalie, then 40, remembers hearing “footsteps running behind” her and had initially panicked she was about to be mugged but, given it was 3pm and she was just a short walk away from the hustle and bustle of the nearby shops with many people nearby, she assumed she was safe.
She was wrong. A man dressed in dark jeans and a black hoodie attacked her from behind and started stabbing her.
Natalie instinctively tried to protect her growing baby bump but told the BBC the attack was “incessant”.
When she caught a peek at her attacker, she thought she recognised him as her loving fiancé Bobby, but was quick to dismiss the idea.
Passersby intervened and pulled the assailant off her while Natalie attempted to escape, heading towards the shops for cover. She said: “I was looking at the town centre… and I remember thinking, ‘I’ve just got to get there, because if I can get there, I can get help’.”
Given the extent of her injuries, Natalie collapsed and momentarily passed out. But her attacker wasn’t done – he managed to break free from the Good Samaritans who got him off Natalie in the first place and headed back towards her to resume the attack as she regained consciousness.
She said: “I put my head down and he pulled up in front of me, and he crouched down and he began the attack again.”
Natalie’s fleeting thought that her loving fiancé and father of her unborn child was responsible for the carnage was true.
Babur ‘Bobby’ Raja stabbed her 24 times. He also injured the passersby who fought him off.
Natalie had zero suspicions about Bobby in the run up to that harrowing day on March 4, 2016.
In the days prior, he’d been “relaxed and cuddling” Natalie in bed, and even bought “treats” for the midwives during a visit to the maternity ward.
On social media, Natalie shared a carousel of images – the first showing her and Bobby embracing. She said: “He admitted he’d been planning it for at least two weeks. He knew in the 1st [photo].
“There was NO warning. He went to work that Friday, bought his lunch 30 mins before, and I spoke to him on the phone 20 mins before it – final words ‘I love you’.”
Bobby’s planning included him keeping the 12-inch carving knife used in the attack and a rucksack “with spare clothes and shoes in his car for two days” but he “acted normally”, giving Natalie no reason to suspect what he was about to do to her.
Natalie described the 9-minute ordeal as “a cold, planned, violent, murder attempt” and said medics branded it “an execution” as Bobby managed to “hit all her major organs”.
She was airlifted to the QE Hospital in Birmingham where “an emergency C-section was performed in theatre alongside major surgery to repair damage to her heart, lungs, liver, wrist and abdomen”.
Both Natalie and her daughter survived but still live with the trauma of what happened.
Babur Raja, 41 at the time, admitted attempted murder, attempted child destruction, possession of a knife in public and the wounding and assault of two passersby.
In court, it was said Bobby had attacked Natalie after being forced to choose between his conservative Muslim mother’s faith and the “love of his life”, which “tipped him over the edge”.
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.