Acid Attacks Against Women....

The latest in tolerance from the Muslim world...

She was attacked by her husband of 15 years on her way home from a garment factory where they both work. “He is a drug addict and has been for a long time. All of the time he asks me for money and for things. He usually beats me to get my money,” she says through an interpreter.

“On that day he again was asking me for money, and I had said no. That day I went to work, finished work, and when I went to leave he was waiting for me. He attacked me with acid straight in my face.”

Lucky, who is 26 and a mother to two young sons, was helped by people on the street. When she got home her village leader told her to go to the police who referred her to a special hospital and rehabilitation centre for victims in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, run by a charity.

Her story is depressingly common for retired British plastic surgeon Ron Hiles, who has operated on hundreds of acid attack victims – mostly women. Last year the small 40-bed clinic in Dhaka, called the Acid Survivors' Foundation (ASF), treated 700 patients. “There are a lot of women called Lucky and Beauty who come to the clinic who have had their faces destroyed by an acid burn,” he says.

Acid has become a common weapon – partly because it is cheap, a bottle costs about 60 cents, about 40p, and partly because conviction rates are low. The reasons for the attack are varied - from going out without the husband's permission, neglecting the house or children, to cooking a bad meal.

Mr Hiles saw Lucky seven days after the attack and wanted to operate almost immediately to try to save her eyes. But the anaesthetic procedure had scared her so much that at first she refused surgery.

“I never knew an operation would be needed to heal my face,” she explains. “I never thought my skin would be removed and put on my face. I was afraid I would not wake-up after the operation, and as I have never had an operation before I did not know what it involved.”

Mr Hiles, from Bristol, spends between two and four months of his free time a year volunteering in Bangladesh and has done for the last 27 years. He was already helping a colleague in Dhaka treat the increasing number of women who were coming in with acid burns on their faces and bodies when the special ASF centre was set up, ten years ago last month.

Instead of spending his retirement relaxing, Mr Hiles has been back and forth to the clinic, watching it grow. Back then it had eight beds, now a decade later, the hospital has 40 beds along with a small army of plastic surgeons, burns therapists, nurses and physiotherapists from the UK who come out to treat patients and train local staff.

In the last trip alone, from which he returned last month, Mr Hiles operated on 50 patients, including Lucky and completed around 200 procedures - spending up to seven hours on a case.