She wanted to experience Taliban-free Afghanistan: Sushmita's brother

Twenty four hours have crossed after the dastardly murder of Indian author Sushmita Banerjee by alleged Taliban assailants in Afghanistan. Yet no one has offered a conclusive answer to the question: Why did she return to Afghanistan after a daring escape about two decades back?

Her brother Gopal Banerjee told CNN-IBN, “Once the Taliban were thrown out of Afghanistan, she wanted to go back and experience the changed life there. She was keen on finding out whether the people of Afghanistan returned to a normal life after being terrorised by the Taliban forces for around a decade.”

He also said, “There has been no communication or any contacts from the side of the government.”

She had only recently moved back to southern Afghanistan to live with her Afghan husband Jaanbaz Khan. Banerjee, who told her story of life under the Islamist Taliban in “A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife”, was dragged from her house in southeastern province of Paktika in Afghanistan and shot as many as two dozen times on Thursday.

Banerjee was making a documentary about the lives of women in Paktika when she was killed, said the head of Afghanistan’s National Journalists’ Union, Faheem Dashty. She was intended to write another book about Afghanistan, her Indian publisher, Swapan Biswas said.