Dh380,000 reward to catch Taliban gunmen who shot Pakistani schoolgirl

The UAE has prepared to receive Malala Yousafzai, 14, but medics say she is too ill to move after surgery to remove a bullet from her head.

Pakistani school girls praying for the recovery of 14-year-old child activist, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban.

ISLAMABAD // Plans to transfer a 14-year-old rights campaigner to the UAE or elsewhere abroad for further medical treatment after she was shot by a Taliban gunman have been postponed, Pakistani authorities and diplomats said yesterday.

Malala Yousafzai was unconscious in a Peshawar military hospital yesterday after surgery overnight to remove a bullet from her head, doctors said.

On Tuesday, Yousafzai, a ninth-grader, was aboard a bus with other children going home from school in the northern Swat Valley when the gunman approached her and her friends, asked for her by name, aimed a pistol at her head and fired. A round tore through her neck and lodged in her head. Another girl was also wounded.

The provincial government announced a 10 million rupee ($104,000) reward for information leading to the capture of Malala’s attackers.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, the spokesman of Pakistan's main Taliban faction, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the attack. "This was a new chapter of obscenity, and we have to finish this chapter," he said by telephone to the Associated Press.

Yesterday US President Barack Obama decried the “disgusting” shooting of a teenaged Pakistani activist by the Taliban, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon also expressed horror at the attack.

Malala won praise and admiration both in Pakistan and abroad after she began writing a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC in early 2009. The blog exposed Taliban atrocities and promoted education for girls, which the Taliban oppose.

Last year she was a finalist for the International Children's Peace Prize, awarded by a Dutch organisation that praised her courage for standing up for girls' education amid rising fundamentalism. The Pakistani government also awarded her a national peace prize and 1 million rupees ($10,500).

After the shooting, Yousufzai was transported to the military hospital in Peshawar, where she remained yesterday in the hospital's intensive-care unit, Dr Mumtaz Khan told reporters.

Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, said plans to transport Yousufzai abroad for treatment had been postponed after doctors reported her out of danger.

"She is being kept under intense observation for 48 hours….plans to fly her out have for the time being been suspended."

A spokeswoman for the Pakistani embassy in the UAE said the mission was aware of the decision to delay the girl's transfer but had prepared everything necessary if she arrived in Dubai.

"We received an order to arrange for the transport and treatment of the girl in the UAE, and so everything is set and we are prepared for whatever decision comes from Islamabad," said Zahida Parveen, who did not disclose the name of the Dubai hospital where Malala could receive further treatment. The embassy has also arranged accommodation for the girl's family, she added.

Her father, Ziauddin Yousufzai, said yesterday that his daughter had defied Taliban threats for years, believing the good work she was doing for her community was her best protection.

"We were being threatened. A couple of times, letters were thrown in our house, that Malala should stop doing what she is doing or the outcome will be very bad," he told Reuters by telephone.

But despite the threats, he said he had turned down offers of protection from the security forces. "We stayed away from that because she is a young female. The tradition here does not allow a female to have men close by," he said.

Malala had spent many sleepless nights kept awake by gunfire, had been forced to flee her home with her two younger brothers and walked past the headless bodies of those who defied the Taliban. Her parents also wanted her to have some chance of a normal childhood, her father said. Security in Swat had improved after the army had pushed back the Taliban in May 2009. Her identity also emerged. "We did not want her to be carrying her school books surrounded by bodyguards. She would not have been able to receive education freely," he said.

Writing under the pen name "Gul Makai" for the BBC, she highlighted the suffering inflicted by Taliban militants.

"I am feeling scary when I go to school because the Taliban have ordered girls not to go to school," she wrote. "Our principal announced in the assembly that the school uniform is being shunned because of the Taliban fear...today just 11 out of 27 girls were attending the class."

Pakistanis joined yesterday in protesting the attack and praying for Malala's recovery.

Special prayers were offered for her recovery in schools and students as well as lawyers staged demonstrations in several cities. The television networks aired special programmes to denounce the attack.

"The cowards who attacked Malala and her fellow students, have shown time and again how little regard they have for human life and how low they can fall in their cruel ambition to impose their twisted ideology," Gen Ashfaq Kayan, the army chief, said in a statement after visiting Malala in hospital.

Mr Zardari, Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, as well as opposition leaders Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan, also denounced the attack.

Pakistan's major religious parties and mosque leaders were mostly silent. Clerics frequently do not condemn suicide bombings or sectarian attacks for fear of alienating their increasingly conservative congregants or provoking the Taliban.

Mr Malik, interior minister, said Malala's attacker and his accomplices have been identified.

"These Taliban are Zalimaan (oppressors). They have nothing to do with Islam or Pakistan," he said. "We will definitely get hold of the attackers and will take them to task."

Police and government officials said Ms Malala and her family had received threats from the Taliban in the past.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said yesterday the says the attack on Malala should serve as a call to action for those promoting the rights of women and girls. Mrs Clinton said the shooting galvanize support for "brave young women ... who struggle against tradition and culture and even outright hostility, and sometimes violence" to pursue their rights. She said the "attack reminds us of the challenges that girls face, whether it is poverty or marginalization or even violence just for speaking out for their basic rights".

Haider reported from Islamabad and Mustafa from Dubai

* With additional reporting by the Associated Press and Reuters