Last Updated, 12:35 p.m. A spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley took 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
spokesman told a newspaper the group would target the girl again if she survived.
Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, told Reuters
in a telephone interview that 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, one of two others 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 other 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.
The military’s press office later released photographs of soldiers evacuating Malala and tending to her in another hospital.
Malala’s uncle said that her condition remained critical, in a telephone interview with Nazrana Yousufzai, a journalist from Swat who now works for Voice of America’s Pashto-language service in Washington.
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.”
Pakistani activists and bloggers expressed their concern and anger at the shooting online.
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