Five girls wounded in acid attacks in Pakistan

At least five Pakistani girls were wounded in two separate acid attacks by motorcycle riders in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, police said Tuesday.

In the latest incident, two unidentified assailants on a motorcycle squirted acid on two girls, aged 14 and 15 in the town of Mastung, some 40 kilometres east of Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan.

"One girl's face was wounded and the other's neck got acid burns," local police official Wazir Lango told AFP.

The girls were returning from the local market when the attack occurred on Tuesday, Lango said, adding that doctors have not yet specified how severe the wounds were.

Lango said that the girls were admitted to hospital, while the police had begun to investigate, but so far the motive behind the attack was unclear.

Separately, two other unknown assailants riding a motorbike threw acid on three girls in their twenties in Quetta on Monday when they were also returning from a market, the city's police chief Abdul Razzaq Cheema told AFP

He said that girls had suffered three to 11 percent burns on their faces.

Acid attacks are common in Pakistan with scores of such assaults taking place each year, often for spurning the advances of men.

Victims are left with horrendous injuries and are often blinded.

Their plight became the focus of a 40-minute Oscar-winning documentary Saving Face by a Pakistani woman Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy in 2012.