“We had long discussions about that, and not only within ourselves but also with her family,” says Khan. ( MORE: How Malala Yousafzai May Affect Pakistan’s Culture Wars)īut the BBC editorial team worried about her safety and whether the Taliban might discover her identity and make her a target. “She had a huge audience, both local and international.” As well as being translated into English for the BBC, her entries were regularly reproduced in local Pakistani media. “It was obviously one of the most popular blogs that we had done in quite a while,” says Khan. The entries, which ran on BBC websites in Urdu and English from January to March 2009, were a hit with BBC Urdu’s following, which includes Pakistani readers in the United Arab Emirates, India, the U.S., Canada and the U.K. She was clearly a very, very intelligent and a very observant girl.”
“She would use these little anecdotal bits to bring out the atmosphere of fear surrounding schools and children in particular. I would call it a very, very fresh, untainted and straight-from-the-heart sort of a take on what was going on,” says Khan. “We were absolutely thrilled by the way she was writing. It was just the sort of personal story the Urdu desk had been looking for. She described going on trips to buy bangles, living in a place as beautiful as the Swat Valley and the disappointment of being banned from school by the Taliban. Finally, Yousafzai suggested his own daughter, 11-year-old Malala.Īnd so Malala chose a pseudonym - Gul Makai, the name of a heroine from a Pashtun folk tale - and began dictating her diary to Kakar weekly over the phone. It was too dangerous, their families said. Such events seemed unthinkable in late 2008, when Khan and his colleagues had discussed a novel way of covering the Taliban’s growing influence in Swat: Why not find a schoolgirl to blog anonymously about her life there? Their correspondent in Peshawar, Abdul Hai Kakar, had been in touch with a local schoolteacher, Ziauddin Yousafzai, but couldn’t find any students willing to do it. ( MORE: Malala Yousafzai’s Injuries: How Difficult Will Her Recovery Be?) It took several hours of working the phones for them to find out that the bullet had torn through her head. All they knew was that Malala had been flown to the city of Peshawar after a bullet reportedly pierced her neck. The journalists desperately wanted to find out how bad the wound was. After a few minutes, Khan’s news editor, Raja Zulfikar Ali, said solemnly, “We have to lead with this. As Khan’s producers saw the news, they sat looking at one another in stunned silence across the bank of desks. That’s when he saw the news posted overnight on BBC Urdu’s website by its team in Pakistan: Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl who had blogged about her life in the Swat Valley for BBC Urdu two years earlier, had been shot by the Taliban. Aamer Ahmed Khan walked through the doors of the BBC’s Art Deco Broadcasting House, just north of bustling Regent’s Street, grabbed a coffee at the staff café and took an elevator to the fifth floor, home to the BBC’s 26-language services.Īt 9:30 a.m., as his staff of 20 trickled in mumbling morning greetings in Urdu, Khan sat down at his desk and logged on to his computer. 9 began like any other Tuesday in London. Follow the head of the BBC’s Urdu service, Oct.
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