KABUL, Afghanistan — The police in Kandahar have arrested 10 Taliban militants they said were involved in an attack earlier this month on a group of Afghan schoolgirls whose faces were doused with acid, officials in Kandahar said Tuesday.
The officials said that the militants, who were Afghan citizens, had confessed to their involvement in the attack on the schoolgirls and their teachers on Nov. 12 and that a high-ranking member of the Taliban had paid the militants 100,000 Pakistani rupees for each of the girls they managed to burn.
The girls were assaulted Nov. 12 by two men on a motorcycle who were apparently irate that the girls dared to attend high school. The men drove up beside them and splashed their faces with what appeared to be battery acid.
Zalmay Ayobi, the spokesman for the governor of Kandahar, said that the orders to carry out the attack had been given from a foreign country, although he did not name the country.
The militants were arrested by the police last week. Mr. Ayobi said a joint delegation from the Interior Ministry and the office of the attorney general in the capital, Kabul, had arrived in Kandahar on Monday to evaluate the cases of the suspects.
The “Kabul delegation led by the deputy interior minister along with the governor of Kandahar announced today that the suspects confessed for their involvements for the acid attack on school girls in Kandahar city which happened on Nov 12,” Mr. Ayobi said.
Mr. Ayobi said Afghanistan’s public courts would decide the attackers’ fate after the investigation was completed.
At least two of the girls were hospitalized by the attack, with their faces blackened and burned.
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