Murdered Indian diarist: Sushmita Banerjee shot dead in eastern Afghanistan

Body found near a madrassa; Taliban deny responsibility.

Suspected Taliban militants shot dead Indian diarist Sushmita Banerjee, who was the writer of a popular memoir about her dramatic escape from the Taliban in the 1990s.

Banerjee, who was married to an Afghan businessman, was killed outside her house in the eastern Paktika province late Wednesday.

“We found her bullet-riddled body near a madrassa on the outskirts of Sharan city (the provincial capital) on Thursday morning,” said provincial police chief Dawlat Khan Zadran.

The police said that the book might have been the reason why militants targeted her. “Our investigation [...] indicates that the militants had grievances against her for something she had written or said in the past, which was then turned into a film,” Zadran said. “She had been shot 20 times and some of her hair had been ripped off by the militants.”

Militants arrived at her house, tied up her husband and other members of the family, took her out and shot her, said the police.

In a statement to the BBC, the Taliban said they did not carry out the attack.

Banerjee, 49, was a well-known writer whose book “Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife”, about her escape from the Taliban in 1995, was made into a Bollywood film, Escape From Taliban, in 2003.

She was married to businessman Jaanbaz Khan and had recently moved back to Afghanistan to live with him in the insurgency-hit Paktika province, reportedly to run a health clinic there.

According to the BBC, Banerjee came to be known as Sayed Kamala and was working as a health worker, filming the lives of local women as part of her work.

(With additional input from BBC, AFP and IANS)

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2013.