National Geographic’s ‘Afghan girl’ arrested
Pakistan authorities hold Sharbat Gula on false ID charge
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN // An Afghan woman immortalised on a celebrated National Geographic magazine cover as a 12- year- old girl was arrested yesterday for living in Pakistan on fraudulent identity papers.
Sharbat Gula’s portrait, taken in a Pakistan refugee camp in 1984 by American photographer Steve McCurry, became one of the most famous cover images in the magazine’s history. Now she faces up to 14 years in jail, a Pakistani official said.
Ms Gula was arrested by Pakistan’s federal investigation agency ( FIA) for fraud after a two- year investigation in the north-west Pakistani city of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan.
“FIA arrested Sharbat Gula, an Afghan woman, today for obtaining a fake ID card,” said Shahid Ilyas, an official of the national database registration authority (Nadra).
Mr Ilyas said that FIA was also seeking three Nadra officials who were found responsible for issuing Pakistan’s national identity card to Ms Gula. The officials have been at large since the fraud was detected.
He said that Ms Gula could be jailed for between seven and 14 years and fined up to US$5,000 ( Dh18,365) if convicted of fraud.
Pakistani officials said that Ms Gula applied for a Pakistani identity card in Peshawar in April 2014, using the name Sharbat Bibi.
She was one of thousands of Afghan refugees who managed to elude Pakistan’s computerised system to acquire an identity card.
The National Geographic image of Ms Gula was taken in 1984 in a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan at the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Mr McCurry tracked her down, after a 17-year search, to a remote Afghan village in 2002 where she was married to a baker and had become the mother of three daughters.
Pakistan has stepped up efforts against fake IDs and launched a reverification campaign.
Officials said Nadra had so far reverified 91 million cards and detected 60,675 fraudulent cards by non-nationals.
A Nadra official said that 2,473 foreigners, mostly Afghans, had surrendered their fake ID cards. More than 350,000 Afghan refugees have returned to their homeland from Pakistan this year, United Nations data shows, with the trend expected to continue.
Pakistan has for decades provided safe haven for millions of Afghans who fled after the Soviet Union invaded in 1979.
Pakistan hosts 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees, according to UNHCR figures from this year, making it the third-largest hosting nation in the world. A further million unregistered refugees are estimated to be in the country. Since 2009, Islamabad has pushed back a deadline for them to return, but fears are growing that the latest cutoff date in March 2017 will be final.