News Service from House Harris

ASIA: 10 Taliban arrested in schoolgirl acid attack

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Nov 25 AP - Afghan police have arrested 10 Taliban militants involved in an acid attack against 15 girls and teachers walking to school in southern Afghanistan, a provincial governor says.

"Several" of the arrested militants had confessed to taking part in the attack earlier this month, said Kandahar Governor Rahmatullah Raufi. He declined to say exactly how many confessed.

High-ranking Taliban fighters paid the militants a total of $US2,000 ($A3,062) to carry out the attack, Raufi said. The attackers came from Pakistan but were Afghan nationals, said Doud Doud, an Interior Ministry official.

The attackers squirted acid from water bottles onto three groups of students and teachers walking to school in Kandahar city on November 12. Several girls suffered burns to the face and were hospitalised. One teenager could not open her eyes days after the attack, which sparked condemnation from around the world.

Afghanistan's government called the attack "un-Islamic," while the UN labelled it "a hideous crime". US First Lady Laura Bush decried it as cowardly.

Kandahar is the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban regime, the hard-line Islamists who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, and one of Afghanistan's most conservative regions, a place where women rarely venture far from home.

A Taliban spokesman earlier this month denied that Taliban militants were involved in the attack.

Girls were banned from schools under Taliban rule, and women were only allowed to leave the house wearing a body-hiding burqa and accompanied by a male family member.

The country has made a major push to improve access to education for girls since the Taliban's ouster. Fewer than one million Afghan children - mostly boys - attended school under Taliban rule. Roughly six million Afghan children, including two million girls, attend school today.

But many conservative families still keep their girls at home.

Raufi said girls attending Mirwais Mena girls' school didn't attend class for three days after the attack, but have since returned.

Kandahar province's schools serve 110,000 students at 232 schools, Raufi said. But only 10 of the 232 are for girls. Some 26,000 girls go to school, he said.

Arsonists have repeatedly attacked girls' schools and gunmen killed two students walking outside a girls' school in central Logar province last year. UNICEF says there were 236 school-related attacks in Afghanistan in 2007.

The Afghan government has also accused the Taliban of attacking schools in an attempt to force teenage boys into the Islamic militia.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, the country's intelligence agency said it has arrested four people, including three religious leaders and a youth, for alleged involvement in suicide and other bomb attacks in northern Kunduz province.

The ring was broken up after a failed bombing mission in the province earlier this year when the would-be bomber failed to properly detonate his explosives, the agency said in a statement Tuesday.