Eight of 10 gunmen behind attempted murder of Pakistani girl 'acquitted'
Reports have emerged revealing that two of the 10 gunmen accused of being behind the attempted murder of Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai have been convicted, contrary to an earlier announcement by Pakistani officials.
While officials in Pakistan had said in April that the ten suspects were sentenced to life in prison, the police chief in Pakistan’s Swat, Salim Khan Marwat, said on Friday that an anti-terrorist court only convicted two of the gunmen, “while eight others were acquitted.”
The militants were reportedly tried not in a court – as previously claimed – but under military supervision, and without the presence of media.
The suspects were arrested in September 2014 during an army offensive.
Meanwhile, Muneer Ahmed, a spokesman for the Pakistani High Commission in London, said the eight were cleared due to lack of evidence. He also claimed that the original court judgment was misreported.
According to legal and security officials in April, ten pro-Taliban militants, reportedly members of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), had been found guilty of shooting the then-14-year-old Malala in the head in an attempt to kill her in October 2012 in the western town of Mingora in her home region, the Swat Valley of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province.
The militants targeted the teenager for promoting education for girls and women in her home region in Pakistan’s northwest.
All of the gunmen were told to have received life imprisonment, which is a 25-year jail term in Pakistan.
Another security official, whose name was not mentioned in reports, said, “Ten men are not behind bars, as the Pakistani authorities would have us believe. That is a big lie.”
Malala has received international awards, and has been admired for her courageous and determined fight in Pakistan for all children to have the right to go to school.
She received the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2013 and was the youngest-ever person to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which she received in 2014.
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