India has put its faith in the Afghan police which, according to BBC, has arrested two people for shooting to death author Sushmita Banerjee outside her home in Paktika province, close to the Pakistan border.
The police chief of Paktika province told the BBC that the arrested were members of the Haqqani militant network. Sushmita had shifted back to Afghanistan recently to live with her husband, an Afghan businessman, after fleeing from the country during the Taliban regime. She had since written a book A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife depicting life under the Taliban regime as hellish for women. A movie, Escape from Taliban, featured her travails to flee her joint family in Afghanistan.
According to the BBC report, a senior police official said Sushmita had been working as a health worker in the province and filming the lives of local women. The Foreign Office here said the Indian Ambassador in Kabul was in touch with the Paktika Governor and the Police Chief.
As for bringing her remains back to the country, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin pointed to the difficulties because Sushmita’s husband is listed as her next of kin and he had performed her final rites near their family home.
