Malala’s letter to Taliban a month after schoolgirls’ ban

Petition alongside letter receives over 640,000 signatures

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Pakistani Taliban as a schoolgirl, has urged Afghanistan’s new rulers to let girls return to school.

It has been one month since the hardline Islamist Taliban excluded girls from returning to secondary school while ordering boys back to class.

“To the Taliban authorities...reverse the de facto ban on girls’ education and reopen girls’ secondary schools immediately,” Yousafzai and a number of Afghan women’s rights activists said in an open letter published on Sunday. A petition alongside the letter had on Monday received more than 640,000 signatures.

AP From left: Johnson, Bailou and Benson Su of Auckland show their bandaids after receiving their vaccination in Auckland.

Malala Yousafzai