Three young women have been left ‘traumatised’ after they believe they were ‘spiked by injection’ in Birmingham’s Gay Village.
The University of Birmingham students – two aged 19 and one aged 20 – rushed to A&E after they felt ‘wiped out’, were ‘sweating excessively’ and had bruises on their arms the morning after.
None of them lost consciousness on their night out on Friday and did not suspect anything awful had happened until one discovered what she thinks is a pin prick hole in the arm of her leather jacket, making her ‘heart drop’.
Both she and her friend had bruises on their arms and, upon closer inspection, she noticed a mark ‘where a pin prick could have been’.
The student said: ‘I was so confused because I was wearing a jacket the entire night.
‘So then I looked through my jacket and I found a pin prick hole where my bruise was in the jacket – my heart just dropped. Before I was invalidating it a bit because I hadn’t had the experience of feeling out of it.
‘My arm had been hurting all day but I just dismissed it. I have quite bad health anxiety so this is literally traumatising.’
The two women travelled to A&E at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and later reported the incident to the police.
The third student, who was the first to go to the hospital, revealed she ‘could not remember a thing’ from the night, with her friends saying she was acting ‘out of character’.
‘Usually, she’s bubbly, kind, never starts an argument,’ they said. ‘She was getting quite argumentative and running away.
‘She couldn’t remember anything she had done, people were telling her things she’d done on the night and she couldn’t recall any of it, which is unlike her.
‘We all felt awful but we thought: “Maybe it’s just a hangover.”‘
West Midlands Police told Metro.co.uk they had launched an investigation into the alleged ‘spiking by injection’ – a phenomenon in the UK, with the very first cases reported in October last year.
Traditionally, spiking has been the term used for when alcohol or drugs are put into someone’s drink without their consent.
Since then, more than 1,300 reports of needle spiking have been made to UK police forces.
A spokesperson for the police commented on the latest reports: ‘The women – who are friends – all noticed bruising to their arms the following day.
‘They also could not recall events from the previous evening. This led them to believe they had been spiked and report this to us. Further enquiries will be carried out.’
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