Lahore: A 16-year-old Pakistani girl has suffered horrific injuries after two men hurled acid in her face in a row over a failed marriage proposal, officials said on Sunday.
Shabnam Batool was attacked late on Saturday at her home in the village of Qaim Bharwana in western Pakistan’s Punjab province.
“Two men, Mohammad Tauseef and Asmat Ullah, climbed the wall of a house while family members were asleep and threw acid on the face of Shabnam Batool,” police investigating officer Ejaz Hussain said.
He said the two men were angry because the girl’s family had rejected a marriage proposal from Ullah.
Hussain said Tauseef was arrested but police were still raiding different addresses in an attempt to apprehend Ullah.
Mohammad Mumtaz, a senior doctor at the main hospital in the nearby city of Jhang, said Batool had sustained 90 per cent burns on her face, and her eyes had been badly injured.
Acid attacks, which disfigure and often blind their overwhelmingly female victims, have long been used to settle personal or family scores in Pakistan, with hundreds of cases reported each year.
The attacks fit a wider pattern of eroding women’s rights in the conservative Muslim nation, where women are frequently treated as second-class citizens and there is no law against domestic violence.
