BBC World News to screen doco on Malala Yousafzai

BBC World News will broadcast a 2009 documentary on Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year- old schoolgirl shot by a Taliban gunman last week on her way home from school.

Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen for speaking out about suffering under the regime, in what has been described as a “barbaric attack.”

She is now in Britain where she’ll receive specialist medical treatment.

BBC World News will today screen a 2009 documentary Class Dismissed – the Death of Female Education which brought Malala to the world’s attention.

In 2009, Malala wrote an anonymous blog for the BBC about life under the Taliban in her home city of Mingora in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

The same year, Adam Ellick, a journalist and film-maker from The New York Times, began to make a film about Malala and her family. The documentary followed her struggle to keep up her education amid Taliban attempts to close all girls’ schools in the area and when it was broadcast three years ago on The New York Times’ website, it brought Malala to the world’s attention.

The BBC’s 24 hour news channel BBC World News is the first broadcaster to air the documentary.

BBC World News today (Tuesday 16th October, 2012) at 2:30pm and 7:30pm AEDT and on Wednesday 17th October at 2.30am AEDT.