14-year-old Malala Yousafzai: shining star, flag bearer:

International anger at shooting of Pakistan campaigner

PAKISTAN: International outrage grew Thursday at the shooting of a teenage Pakistani campaigner by the Taliban, with US President Barack Obama leading condemnation of the “disgusting” attack.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon also expressed horror at the attack on Malala Yousafzai, 14, who is in intensive care after being shot in the head in broad daylight on a school bus on Tuesday, an assassination attempt that has appalled Pakistan.

It took place in Mingora, the main town of the Swat valley in Pakistan’s northwest, where Malala had campaigned for the right to an education during a two-year Taliban insurgency which the army said it had crushed in 2009.

On Wednesday doctors successfully performed surgery to remove the bullet lodged near her shoulder, where it moved after entering her head, in a military hospital in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Preparations were made to fly her abroad, but a military source told AFP she was currently too ill to travel. White House spokesman Jay Carney later said US forces were ready to offer transport and treatment to the teenager if needed.

Her uncle Saeed Ramzan said doctors told the family Malala was stable after the three-hour operation.

“But they said the next 48 hours are important and after that it will be decided whether she will be sent abroad or not,” he told AFP at the family home in Mingora, which is under heavy police guard.

“We saw movement in her body today but she is still unconscious.” Obama described the shooting as “reprehensible and disgusting and tragic,” Carney said, amid escalating international anger over the attack.

“Directing violence at children is barbaric, it’s cowardly and our hearts go out to her and the others who were wounded as well as their families.” Ban was “deeply moved” by her campaign for education rights and called for “the perpetrators of this heinous and cowardly act to be swiftly brought to justice,” his spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

European Union foreign policy representative Catherine Ashton earlier condemned the attack as a “a vile aggression”.

President Hamid Karzai of neighbouring Afghanistan, where a fierce Taliban insurgency is raging, telephoned his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari to condemn the shooting, according to a statement from the Pakistani government.

“Such incidents of barbarity strengthen national resolve to fight militants to the finish,” Zardari told the Afghan president.

Malala won international recognition for highlighting Taliban atrocities in Swat with a blog for the BBC three years ago, when the Islamist militants burned girls’ schools and terrorised the valley.

AFP