Malala Yousafzai says she’s ‘grateful’ she can’t remember being shot in the head by the Taliban 

Malala Yousafzai says she’s ‘grateful’ she can’t remember being shot in the head by the Taliban

  • Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban on her school bus in Pakistan in 2012
  • She became an icon for continuing to campaign for women’s educational rights 
  • She told BBC Radio 4 that she had to rely on a friend to tell her what happened 

Even by the savage standards of the Taliban, it was a sickening attempt to murder a teenager just for wanting an education.

Now Malala Yousafzai says she is ‘grateful’ she cannot recall anything about the moment a gunman shot her in the head on a school bus in her native Pakistan.

The 23-year-old, who won a Nobel Prize after she refused to be silenced by the attack, had to rely on a friend to tell her what happened that day in 2012, when she was just 15.

Malala Yousafzai says she is ‘grateful’ she cannot recall anything about the moment a gunman shot her in the head on a school bus in her native Pakistan

The friend told her: ‘You were just staring at [the gunman] and you squeezed my hand so tightly that I could feel the pain for days. Suddenly bullets were fired, and you fell in my lap.’

Speaking on today’s Desert Island Discs, Malala says: ‘I am grateful that I don’t remember the incident. I remember sitting in the school bus talking to my friends, just talking to the bus driver and he was doing some, like, magic tricks with a pebble.

‘Then [he] started driving and I don’t remember anything. Then I woke up in hospital in Birmingham.’ She had been airlifted to the UK for specialist treatment at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where she came out of a coma eight days after the shooting.

Malala became an international icon for continuing to campaign for women’s educational rights, despite the attack. 

But she admits that studying at Oxford University, from where she graduated last year with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics, gave her a fresh perspective on life.

She tells presenter Lauren Laverne: ‘I wasn’t having much fun before university. But when I went to university and when I connected to people of my age, friends of my age, that is when I realised that, OK, I am actually not that old and I can still have those experiences of youth that I deserve and that everybody else is having. When you are with your friends, you are just having one of your best times ever.

‘Childhood has sort of come back in me and I am really happy for that.’

Malala, who chose lip balm as her desert island luxury, also reveals that she is a fan of West End musicals and vintage sitcoms Blackadder, Only Fools And Horses and Yes Minister.

Meanwhile, in an exclusive interview for Mail Online, her father Ziauddin said: ‘In our community, when a girl reaches 23 she is usually married by now and has little say in the matter.

‘I’m the kind of father who believes in their children’s education and freedom. She has the right to choose her own partner or nobody at all, it’s up to her.’

Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11am and will be repeated on Friday at 9am.

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