Pakistan arrests militants linked to attack on Malala

Army says it has arrested 10 men over the 2012 murder attempt that left the schoolgirl campaigner for girl's education severely wounded.

Pakistani rights activist Malala Yousafzai speaks at the Girl Summit 2014 in London, England, on July 22, 2014. Oli Scarff / AFP

ISLAMABAD // Pakistan’s army said yesterday that it had arrested 10 militants for involvement in the 2012 attack against Malala Yousafzai, who won world acclaim after she was shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating women’s rights.

The suspects attacked Yousafzai, then 16, on orders from Mullah Fazlullah, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, said army spokesman Gen Asim Saleem Bajwa said.

The army is currently waging a major offensive against the extremist group in North Waziristan, a tribal region along the border with Afghanistan that has long been a militant stronghold.

“The entire gang involved in the murder attempt ... has been busted,” Gen Bajwa said, adding that the “terrorists” were part of Tehrik-e-Taliban, an umbrella group encompassing militant organisations across the tribal areas.

The group had a hit list of 22 other targets.

Malala, a teenage activist who had called for expanding girls’ education in deeply conservative areas of Pakistan, was shot in the head in October 2012 while returning from school.

Two other girls were also wounded in the attack.

After narrowly surviving the murder bid – one bullet grazed her brain and passed through her neck before lodging in her shoulder – Malala was taken to Britain with her family for treatment, where she now lives.

The Taliban have said they will try again to kill her if she ever returns to Pakistan.

Her courageous recovery has made her a global figure, she won the EU’s prestigious Sakharov human-rights prize last year and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

An address she gave to the United Nations General Assembly in July last year, in which she vowed she would never be silenced, earned her a standing ovation.

She visited Abu Dhabi in January.

Malala first rose to prominence in 2009, when at just 11 years old, she had a blog for the BBC Urdu service chronicling life under Taliban rule in Swat, the beautiful valley in northwestern Pakistan where she lived.

She had become well-known in Pakistan as a young campaigner for girls’ right to attend school after the Taliban took control of Swat in 2007, speaking out against the militants’ ban on female education and their bombing of local schools.

Malala is from the same region that was once home to Fazlullah, who was elevated to his current leadership position after his predecessor, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan.

Fazlullah has been on the run since 2009, when Pakistan launched a major offensive in to eliminate militants.

Pakistan believes Fazlullah is hiding in Afghanistan, and Gen Bajwa said Islamabad had raised the issue with the Afghan government. Both countries have long accused each other of ignoring militants who launch cross-border attacks from their territory.

“We will continue our efforts until [Fazlullah] is arrested or killed,” Bajwa told a televised news conference in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

He did not say when or where the men were captured, but said security agencies detained all 10 in a coordinated operation acting on information from one of the members of the cell. He said the head of the cell had also been arrested.

“The group acted upon the instructions of Mullah Fazlullah who, while based in Kunar, Afghanistan, passed instructions through his two associates,” he said.

He added that it was a “known fact” that Fazlullah and other “terrorists” are hiding in Afghanistan.

The arrests come at a time when Pakistan’s military is carrying out a major operation against militants in North Waziristan. Pakistan launched the June 15 operation after militants attacked one of the country’s busiest airports, in the southern city of Karachi, shocking the nation.

The military says it has so far killed at least 975 militants and that the operation is “progressing” as planned.

* Associated Press with additional reporting by Agence France-Presse