LONDON: Two British teenage girls arrived home yesterday badly burned after acid was hurled in their faces in Zanzibar, while the island’s authorities offered a reward for the capture of their attackers.
Katie Gee and Kirstie Trup, both 18, were flown to a Royal Air Force base in London and were taken straight to a hospital for further treatment, according to media reports.
The teenagers, both Londoners who had been working as volunteer teachers in Zanzibar, were attacked on Wednesday by two men on a motorbike, in the first such attack on foreigners on the Indian Ocean island.
The girls’ families have released a photograph of one of the victims’ injuries, showing dark burns seared across her jaw, neck and chest. Television pictures showed two ambulances driving to meet a private jet at the RAF Northolt base in west London.
The girls, close friends who were due to start university in the coming months, are believed to have been taken straight to the specialist burns unit of a London hospital. Katie’s father Jeremy Gee described the burns as “horrendous”. AFP
