Police investigators are no closer to arresting those responsible for shooting a prominent child rights’ activist in the head despite offering high-profile rewards, officials said Thursday.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack nine days ago on 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai who campaigned for the right to an education in Mingora, the main town of the northwestern Swat valley.
The attack was denounced worldwide and the Pakistani authorities offered a reward of more than $100,000 for the capture of her attackers. Malala was on Monday flown to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England for specialist care where doctors say she is in a stable condition.
But despite repeated public promises from cabinet ministers that Malala’s attackers will be brought to justice, security officials told AFP that a joint police-military investigation still had no substantive leads.
Pakistan has an appalling record on convicting terror suspects. Few cases ever come to trial and those who are charged and taken to court are often acquitted for lack of evidence.
Police and security officials have named one suspected planner as Attaullah, whose house in Swat was raided last week. “Some of his family members are in police custody but they are not suspects. This is just to pressurise him to hand himself to police,” one of the officials told AFP on condition of anonymity.
On Monday, a police official in Mingora said an accountant and two watchmen from Malala’s school, who had been in custody for more than a week, had been released for lack of evidence. “More than 200 people have been detained so far but most of them were released. Dozens of people are still under interrogation,” one security official told AFP on condition of anonymity from Swat. A senior police investigator defended the investigation, saying that it would take time to search for clues in the case of such a “well-planned attack”.
