AP
 
Islamabad, Mar 29: Surgeons operated on a two-month-old Pakistani girl Tuesday to remove two foetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in her mother's womb, a doctor said.

 The infant, who was identified only as Nazia, had been in critical condition following the two-hour operation at the Children's Hospital at Pakistan Institute of Medical Science in Islamabad, said Zaheer Abbasi, head of paediatric surgery at the hospital.

Abbasi said the case was the first he was aware of in Pakistan of foetus-in-fetu, where a foetus has grown inside another in the womb.

"It is extremely rare to have two foetuses being discovered inside another," Abbasi said, adding that he did not know what caused the medical abnormality. "Basically, it's a case of triplets, but two of the siblings grew in the other."

The baby comes from Abbotabad, about 30 miles north of Islamabad. She is the fifth child of a woman in her 30s.

Abbasi said surgeons removed the two partially grown foetuses, totalling about two pounds, that had died at about 4 months before.

Other foetus-in-fetu cases have been reported elsewhere in the world. A report in a June 2000 issue of the Paediatrics called such occurrences rare and estimated their rate at about 1 per 500,000 births.