http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_n ... x-20110210

NYPOST.COM | NEWSROOM - Moments away from pleading guilty, an accused Manhattan nightclub brute launched into a bizarre self-defense tirade Thursday against the young nurse he is charged with trying to beat to death after she rejected him on the dance floor -- claiming she had attacked him first by biting his hand.

Mbarek Lafrem, 31, was cuffed at the defense table of a Manhattan courtroom this morning, on the brink of pleading guilty to the vicious March 2010 assault at the Seventh Avenue club Social.

The attack had left the woman lying unconscious, bleeding and stripped from the waist down on a floor of a bathroom stall. Under Thursday's deal, the Pennsylvania metal worker -- a green card-carrying Moroccan who was in the city on a construction job -- would have served anywhere from 12 to 18 years prison.

But when asked by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon if he had anything to say, Lafrem -- who had been listening to the proceeding through an Arabic translator-- said he wanted to speak in English.

In his ensuing rant, Lafrem alternated between professions of both guilt and innocence. He also insisted that he both remembered and did not remember the assault, and bizarrely described the nurse as coming at him -- for no reason -- in the club's basement bathroom, where he just happened to be.

"She push me, she slap me in the face," he said. "When I hold her hand, she bite me. That's why I hit her twice in the head," he said.

"It was only her and me and God between us as witness," he said, before adding, oddly, "I don't remember anything."

The judge gave Lafrem until his next court date, Feb. 23, to make up his mind or proceed to trial. If convicted at trial of the top charges, attempted murder and first degree assault, Lafrem faces up to 25 years prison.

The victim, a 20-year-old pediatric nurse, suffered a broken nose and a fractured eye socket and needed 50 stitches to her face.

SOURCE: NYPOST.COM