The 38-year-old French woman hanged herself, doctors said. Her family allowed her face to be removed so that another woman with severe facial injuries would have the chance of a normal life.

Isabelle Dinoire, also 38, who has made medical history as the recipient, expressed her gratitude to the donor�s family yesterday for letting the operation go ahead.

In her first public comments since the surgery, Dinoire said that she had also tried to kill herself six months ago. It was while she was unconscious after an overdose that her dog had attacked her, leaving her with what she called �terrifying� injuries.

�I am very grateful to this woman,� Dinoire said. �I thank her family for giving their permission for this operation. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.�

Olivier Jard�, a professor of ethics at Amiens University hospital centre and who was involved in the preparations for the operation, said that the donor was brain dead when she arrived at hospital.

She was examined by doctors in the northern city of Lille where her features were later removed, Jard� said. He cited French law in refusing to identify her.

The face was grafted on to Dinoire in a 15-hour overnight operation that ended on Monday morning at Amiens, south of Lille. Yesterday Dinoire was able to admire the results.

�I have been looking at my face in the mirror,� she said from her hospital bed. �It is very impressive. They have given me my face back.�

Dinoire, an unmarried mother of two teenage daughters, admitted that during a sudden fit of depression she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills last May at her council flat near the town of Valenciennes. She declined to say what had prompted her suicide attempt. �It�s a secret,� she said.

Her comments contradicted a statement by her surgeon, Jean-Michel Dubernard, who last Friday denied a French media report that she had tried to kill herself. He claimed that she had taken a pill to try to sleep after an argument with one of her daughters and had just woken up when she was mauled � perhaps after stepping on the dog.

The confirmation that Dinoire had wanted to end her life reinforces an astonishing parallel with her donor�s state of mind, but is likely to stoke an ethical debate over the transplant.

Critics have emphasised the psychological toughness required to adapt to carrying a dead person�s face � and to cope with the intense public scrutiny after such pioneering surgery. Yesterday Dinoire said that her appearance after the attack had been so frightening that she had not hesitated � �not for a moment� � to go ahead and she had no regrets.

Speaking to The Sunday Times and a friend on her mobile phone, she praised the surgeons for having done a �magnificent� job.