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Gulalai Ismail is in the United States, it is the New York Times who revealed the information first. The Pakistani activist was wanted across the country for treason. Gulalai Ismail claims that it was in fact her fight to denounce the abuses committed by the Pakistani army that earned her this manhunt, and that led her to flee her country.
Gulalai Ismail has been denouncing for years the human rights violations committed in Pakistan, especially against women and girls. She was still a teenager when she co-founded in 2002 an NGO advocating gender equality in the highly conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region. Since then, the young woman has accumulated the awards, the most prestigious being in 2017 the Anna Politkovskaya Award for the defense of human rights.
But Gulalai Ismail really garnered attention in her country when she supported the Pashtun protesters , denouncing sexual harassment of the army against women. She has since been arrested twice, in October and February, before being charged with provoking the state when she was demonstrating after the rape of a 10-year-old girl.
She decides to hide, the government forbids her to leave the country. A large-scale police operation is launched to find her. She ends up joining, via Sri Lanka, the United States, where she now lives with her sister. The 32-year-old woman applied for political asylum. She told the New York Times that she is worried about her parents, who are still living in Pakistan under close surveillance, who are accused, she says, of financing terrorism.
Gulalai Ismail, a women's rights activist and a fugitive on Pakistan's most wanted list, has escaped to the US with the help of an underground network. She said she did not do it any more, but she did not do it any more than putting "many lives at risk." https://t.co/S3PoZQii3J
New York Times World (@nytimesworld) September 20, 2019