Islamabad:

Pakistan’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai on Wednesday visited her hometown in the troubled northwest of the country for the first time after being shot by the Taliban and met her family members.

She flew by helicopter to Barkana in Shangla district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where she met with her uncle, Ramazan, who recently underwent surgery in Islamabad after suffering from heart problems, and also visited the ancestral graveyard, The Dawn newspaper reported.

Local Karora Station House Officer (SHO) Amjad Alam Khan told Dawn.com that Malala was accompanied by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, and her husband, Aseer Malik, who she married in 2021.

SHO Khan said she also visited the school and college she had established in Barkana in 2018 to provide free education to approximately one thousand girls in the district, which previously had no functional government college for girls.

“Malala met students, inspected classes and spoke to students while urging them to study and make their future brighter,” the SHO said, adding that the Malala Fund would ensure a high standard of education at the college free of charge.

Malala also visited the home of her maternal family.

Also present was education activist Shahzad Roy, who runs the Shangla Girls School and College under Zindagi Trust. He briefed her about the facilities provided by the college.

She returned to Islamabad after her short visit. Malala’s first visit to Pakistan since being shot was in 2018. Following that, she visited Pakistan in 2022 to travel to areas devastated by unprecedented monsoon flooding and met its victims.

She also visited in January this year to attend the International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities held in Islamabad. PTI SH GSP GSP

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