By TwoCicrles.net Staff Reporter,
Kabul/Kolkata: The Taliban have denied Afghan officials allegations that they were behind the abduction and killing of Indian writer Sushmita Banerjee in eastern Paktika province of Afghanistan.
The police had found the 49 year old Banerjee’s bullet-riddled body near a Madrasah on the outskirts of Paktika’s provincial capital, Sharan city, a day after she was dragged out of her husband’s house on late Wednesday by unidentified gunmen and repeatedly shot at .
Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s spokesman in Afghanistan, quoted by AFP news agency said, ”We checked with our local Taliban fighters in the area and they also heard the reports and allegations that the Taliban were behind the assassination of this woman who had converted to Islam. But this is the enemy’s propaganda that is blaming us for killing a woman.”
Sushmita Banerjee, was the author of the popular memoir, Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife, a book detailing her experiences as an Indian woman married to an Afghan man, in the backdrop of Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s.
Her book was published in India in 1998 and was eventually brought to silver screen in 2003. The Bollywood movie Escape From Taliban saw Manisha Koirala donning the role of Sushmita Banerjee . She later commented that the movie showed her Afghan husband and family in bad light and had distorted her story.
According to her publisher, she was in Afghanistan to work on a new book, which is about the current scenario of women in that country.
Her body will be flown back to Kolkata, on the initiative by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.