A senior member of the Pakistani Taliban has written an open letter to Malala Yousafzai expressing regret that he didn't warn her before the attack, but claiming that she was targeted for maligning the insurgents.

Friday, July 19, 2013

A senior member of the Pakistani Taliban has written an open letter to Malala Yousafzai expressing regret that he didn't warn her before the attack, but claiming that she was targeted for maligning the insurgents.

Taliban's letter to Malala Yousafzai: this is why we tried to kill you

Saba Imtiaz in Karachi
The Guardian, Wednesday 17 July 2013 15.33 EDT

Malala Yousafzai has received a rambling letter from a Taliban commander, claiming she was targeted for maligning it. Photograph: Rick Bajornas/UN Photo/PA

A senior member of the Pakistani Taliban has written an open letter to Malala Yousafzai – the teenager shot in the head as she rode home on a school bus – expressing regret that he didn't warn her before the attack, but claiming that she was targeted for maligning the insurgents.
Adnan Rasheed, who was convicted for his role in a 2003 assassination attempt on the country's then-president Pervez Musharraf, did not apologise for the attack, which left Malala gravely wounded, but said he found it shocking.
"I wished it would never happened [sic] and I had advised you before," he wrote.
Malala was 15 when she and two classmates were targeted by a masked gunman who picked them out on a school bus as they went home from school in Pakistan's northwest Swat valley last October.
She was seriously injured in the attack, and was flown to Britain to receive specialist treatment from doctors in Birmingham, where she and her family now live.
Last week, she celebrated her 16th birthday by delivering a defiant speech at the United Nations in New York, in which she called on world leaders to provide free schooling for all children.
In the letter, Rasheed claimed that Malala was not targeted for her efforts to promote education, but because the Taliban believed she was running a "smearing campaign" against it.
"You have said in your speech yesterday that pen is mightier than sword," Rasheed wrote, referring to Malala's UN speech, "so they attacked you for your sword not for your books or school."
The rambling four-page letter, in patchy English, citing Bertrand Russell, Henry Kissinger and historian Thomas Macaulay, was released to media organisations in Pakistan.

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