A court in Pakistan’s Peshawar rejected bail for the famous ‘Afghan Girl’ who’s suffering from Hepatitis C and looks after her four children alone after her spouse died four years ago.
Sharbat Gula, National Geographic magazine’s famed ‘Afghan Girl’, has been in the custody of the Federal Investigation Agency since October 26 for having obtained fake identity papers.
The special court in Peshawar had reserved its verdict a day earlier and today rejected her bail application.
She faces up to 14 years in jail.
On Tuesday, Sharbat Gula’s lawyer told the Peshawar high court that she had Hepatitis C. Earlier, interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had said he had asked the FIA to facilitate her release on humanitarian grounds.
Afghan ambassador Omar Zakhilwal, who had expressed confidence that Sharbat Gula would be freed, said in a Facebook post that he was dismayed by the court’s decision.
In 1984, National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry took the haunting image of Sharbat Gula, then aged about 12, at Nasir Bagh refugee camp on the edge of Peshawar. The photo, which became the most famous cover image in the magazine’s history, was likened to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
After a 17-year search, McCurry tracked Sharbat Gula in 2002 to a remote Afghan village, where she was married to a baker and the mother of three daughters. National Geographic also made a documentary about her life that dubbed her the “Mona Lisa of the Afghan war”.
