Iconic Afghan refugee faces jail
Pakistan: The green-eyed Afghan woman immortalised as a young girl on the cover of National Geographic magazine has been arrested in Pakistan and faces years in jail for living on false identity papers.
Sharbat Gula, whose haunting stare became the most famous image in the magazine’s history a year after she was photographed in a refugee camp by Steve McCurry in 1984, was arrested in Peshawar yesterday after an investigation by Pakistani security forces.
Gula is one of thousands of Afghan refugees to have obtained fake identity cards from corrupt officials, investigators said. If convicted she could face up to 14 years in jail and a heavy fine.
Her arrest comes as Pakistan is seeking to force three million Afghan refugees to return home, reversing the exodus that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Gula joined that throng when her parents were killed by Soviet bombing in 1984. With her grandmother, brother and three sisters, Gula followed the mountain pass into Pakistan, ending up in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp.
McCurry found her there a few months later, shooting his renowned image in December 1984. With a red scarf draped over her head, framing her piercing eyes, the photo, Afghan Girl, appeared on National Geographic’s June cover the next year. As a teenager, Gula married a baker and returned to Afghanistan.
It is unclear when she returned to Pakistan. - The Times