Famed Afghan woman Sharbat Gula's bail plea rejected

Afghan ambassador urges PM Nawaz to 'intervene and instruct Sharbat Gula’s release'

The bail plea of Sharbat Gula, NatGeo’s famed green-eyed ‘Afghan girl’, was rejected on Wednesday.

The 46-year-old was arrested last week for fraudulently attaining a Pakistani ID card, allegations she has strongly denied.

Earlier on Tuesday, Gula's lawyer told Peshawar High Court that her client was fighting Hepatitis C. On the same day, Afghan ambassador in Islamabad Omar Zakhilwal expressed confidence that Gula would be freed after diplomats met and assured her that she would be acquitted.



Disappointed with the decision, Afghan Ambassador in Islamabad, Omar Zakhilwal said, "The arrest of Sharbagula, one of the world’s most recognized and Afghanistan’s most beloved image had already hurt feelings of all Afghans, and today’s ruling was a further disregard to those feelings and the bilateral people to people relations and the “winning of hearts and minds” that we claim to be important and therefore our aim."

“At this stage I call on the Honourable Prime Minister of Pakistan, to whom I will also send a formal request, to intervene in this matter and instruct the release of Sharbatgula,” Zakhilwal said in a statement received by The Express Tribune.

On Sunday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said he had urged the FIA to facilitate the Afghan woman’s release on humanitarian grounds.



A special team of the FIA had arrested Gula on October 26 from Nauthia locality of Peshawar. Gula rose to famous after a photograph of her appeared on a 1985 cover of National Geographic.

The photo had been likened with Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. National Geographic also made a short documentary about her life and dubbed her the ‘Mona Lisa of Afghan war’.

Afghans say Gula belonged to Pachir Aw Agam district in eastern Nangarhar province, bordering Pakistan. At the age of six, she had lost her father and mother, in a bombing by the Soviet fighter jets during the USSR’s occupation of Afghanistan.

She had migrated to Pakistan along with her brother, three sisters and grandmother where she married Rehmat Gul, a baker near Peshawar in 1990. Together they have three daughters – Rubina, Zahida and Aalia.