Malala Yousafzai: Pakistani 14 -y old schoolgirl campaigner, shot in Swat.

Malala Yousafzai: Pakistani 14 -y old schoolgirl campaigner, shot in Swat.(Telegraph).Malala Yousafzai was on her way home from school in the former Taliban stronghold of Swat when two men opened fire, shooting her in the forehead and injuring a friend. Witnesses said a bearded man had asked for the girl by name before opening fire. Her work earned her international recognition and numerous peace awards after she was revealed as Gul Makai, the brave seventh grader who wrote a blog for the BBC’s Urdu service when the Taliban controlled Swat in 2009. But it also brought death threats. In March, a spokesman for the Pakistan Taliban said the girl was on their hit list. The shooting has shocked Pakistan, a nation long hardened to sickening acts of violence. No-one has claimed responsibility for the attack in the region’s main town of Mingora, but few were in any doubt that terrorists were to blame.
Mian Iftikhar Husing Husain, the local information minister, said: “It is the sign of weakness of Taliban that they have been targeting females.” Doctors at the Saidu Sharif Medical Complex in Mingora said Malala would be transferred to a hospital in the north-western city of Peshawar for further treatment but both girls were in a stable condition.
 Malala – whose name means “grief-stricken” in the local Pashto language - was 11 when the Taliban took over the Swat Valley and ordered girls’ schools to close. Pakistan’s shaky government appeared to appease the hardline militants, signing a ceasefire in 2009 and leaving Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric, to preside over the area. Malala’s anonymous blog is credited with being one of the first voices to alert the world to his brutal campaign of beheadings and violence as well as the closure of girls’ schools. In it, she described how her terrified classmates were forced to hide books under their shawls and lived in fear of having acid thrown in their faces. She continued to keep her diary when the Pakistani military eventually launched an offensive against the militants. Read the full story here.