A spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley claimed responsibility for the shooting on Tuesday of a 14-year-old activist who is an outspoken advocate of education for girls. The attack on Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head on her way home from school in Mingora, the region's main city, outraged many Pakistanis, but a militant spokesman told a newspaper the group would target the girl again if she survived.
Come on , brothers, be REAL MEN. Kill a school girl.
- Nadeem F. Paracha (@NadeemfParacha) 9 Oct 12
Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, told Reuters in a telepho ne interview Malala “was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her idol.†He admitted that she was young, but said that “she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas,†referring to the ethnic group in northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan whose conservative values the Taliban claims to defend.
Another girl, who was wounded in the attack, said in a television interview with Pakistan's Express News that a man had stopped the school bus and asked which girl was Malala before opening fire.
Pakistan's Express Tribune reported that doctors at a hospital in Mingora, the region's main city, said that Malala was “out of danger†because the bullet that “struck her skull and came out on the o ther side and hit her shoulder†had not damaged her brain. The newspaper added that the girl was later moved to Peshawar in a Pakistani Army helicopter.
Malala became well-known in Pakistan as the author of a blog for the BBC's Urdu-language Web site, “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl,†in which she chronicled life under Taliban rule, after the Swat Valley was overrun by the Islamist militants in 2009. “At that time,†she wrote later, “some of us would go to school in plain clothes, not in school uniform, just to pretend we are not students, and we hid our books under our shawls.â€
My colleague Adam Ellick interviewed Malala extensively in 2009, for a two-part documentary about her father's struggle to reopen a school for girls in Swat after the Pakistani military regained control of the valley from the Taliban.
A BBC News video report on Malala broadcast last year included footage of her reading from the diary she kept under the pen name Gul Ma kai when she was 11.
