Malala Yousafzai Attackers Secretly Acquitted in Pakistan
According to new reports, 8 of the 10 men who attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai in 2012 were acquitted in Pakistan.
In April 2015, officials in Pakistan said that 10 Taliban fighters had been found guilty and received 25-year jail terms.
However, only two of the men who stood trial were convicted, BBC reported.
The secrecy surrounding the trial, which was held behind closed doors, raised suspicions over its validity.
The Pakistani court claims that the two men convicted were those who shot Malala Yousafzai in 2012.
It was previously thought that both the gunmen and the man who ordered the attack had fled to Afghanistan.
Muneer Ahmed, a spokesman for the Pakistani High Commission in London, said on June 5 that the eight men were acquitted because of a lack of evidence.
Saleem Marwat, the district police chief in Swat, Pakistan, separately confirmed that only two men had been convicted.
Muneer Ahmed claimed that the original court judgment made it clear only two men had been convicted and blamed the confusion on misreporting.
Sayed Naeem, a public prosecutor in Swat, told the Associated Press news agency after the trial: “Each militant got 25 years in jail. It is life in prison for the 10 militants who were tried by an anti-terrorist court.”
In Pakistan, a life sentence is 25 years.
The acquittals emerged after reporters from the Daily Mirror attempted to locate the 10 convicted men in prisons in Pakistan.
The whereabouts of the eight acquitted men is not known.
The trial was held at a military facility rather than a court and was shrouded in secrecy, BBC reported. Anti-terrorism trials in Pakistan are not open to the public.
Pakistani authorities did not make the judgment available at any stage, nor did they correct the reports over the past two months that 10 men had been convicted.
The announcement of the convictions in April took many by surprise. No journalists had been made aware that the trial was taking place.
The Pakistani authorities did not say when and where the men had been arrested or how they were linked to the attack, or explain the charges against them.
Malala Yousafzai, who is now 17, was targeted by Taliban gunmen while she was travelling home from school in the town of Mingora.
The gunmen boarded a bus and asked for her by name before shooting her in the head.
She was targeted after campaigning for education rights for girls. She also wrote an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu service, describing life under the Taliban
Malala Yousafzai was treated for her injuries in the UK and currently lives in Birmingham with her family. They are unable to return to Pakistan because of death threats from the Taliban.