Indian author killed by unknown gunmen in Afghanistan

Al Jazeera reports that unidentified gunmen have shot dead an Indian author in the eastern Afghan province of Paktika, police say. Sushmita Banerjee, the writer of a popular book about her dramatic escape from the Taliban in the 1990s, was shot dead on Wednesday night, police announced on Thursday. “We found her bullet-riddled body near [a religious school] on the outskirts of Sharan city [Paktika’s provincial capital] this morning,” provincial police chief Dawlat Khan Zadran told the AFP news agency. Banerjee, 49, was a fairly well-known writer whose book Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife, about her escape from the Taliban was made into a Bollywood film in 2003. Read article