LONDON — A Pakistani teenager who was wounded by Taliban gunmen opposed to her support of education for girls arrived in Britain on Monday for medical care and rehabilitation.
Malala Yousafzai, 14, was transported by air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates from the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi to Birmingham in central England and taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. She will receive post-trauma treatment, skull reconstruction and neurological rehabilitation for damage caused by a bullet that penetrated her skull.
The newly built hospital where she will be treated is Britain’s main receiving unit for military casualties, specializing in the treatment of firearms and burn victims.
Medical director David Rosser said Malala will be treated by a team whose long experience in battlefield wounds predates the opening of the hospital. “We’ve taken every British battle casualty for over 10 years now,” he told reporters.
Pakistan said it would pay for her treatment.
Malala, a seventh-grader from Pakistan’s Swat valley, was sought out and shot by gunmen who boarded her school bus last week. She is not believed to have suffered severe brain damage. Two of her classmates were also hit; one remains hospitalized in serious condition.
The Taliban took responsibility for the shootings, with its spokesmen saying Malala was targeted in retaliation for promoting Western culture, secularism and education for girls. She came to public attention in 2009 when her diary entries were publicized through the BBC Urdu Service website. They chronicled the Taliban’s draconian rules limiting girls’ education and the defiant decision by her and her classmates to continue their studies.
Worries over Malala’s fate have dominated Pakistan in the past week. Front-page headlines have carried updates of her medical treatment, schoolchildren held prayer services and candlelight vigils, and the political system has united to condemn the Taliban with an unusual vehemence and unity.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of the port of Karachi on Sunday for a solidarity march organized by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the city’s dominant political party.
Several governments, including the United States, had offered to provide emergency treatment for Malala or to fly her abroad.
A senior U.S. official said there had been four “serious” offers of help from the United States, including one from a doctor who had treated Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head and seriously wounded in January 2011.
