Brave Pakistani kid fights against all odds.

[Last Hope]

Seven year-old disabled Pakistan girl, Laiba adjusts her artificial foot as she sits in a wheelchair in the street outside her house at Hayatabad in Peshawar. – AFP

PESHAWAR: Laiba is only seven years old, but she’s a poster girl for thousands of Pakistanis who have lost limbs in the war between the militants and the armed forces.

The girl, whose name means “Fairy of the Heavens”, was shopping in Peshawar with her uncle for a new pair of socks for the Muslim festival of Eid in November 2008 when tragedy struck.

She was accidentally fired by Pakistani troops when the car she was traveling in stopped by a convoy, and though to be a potential suicide bomber.

Doctors could not save her foot and her leg was amputated mid-shin. Her right leg, despite five major operations, is still embedded with shrapnel.

Now, Laiba lies in bed at her grandfather’s house in Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province, playing with an artificial foot, shy and silent after her trauma.

“It is strange to be scared in our own country of our own people,” said her mother, Razia Khan.

Laiba’s family said they encountered a wall of silence when trying to get justice for their daughter.

“Police registered the first information report against ‘unknown people’, despite the fact that everything was clear,” says her father Asim Khan, a supervisor at the Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation in Islamabad.

“I want them to accept responsibility and pay for the treatment of my daughter,” he said.

The family has been able to drum up public support for Laiba’s cause, with TV channels and newspapers reporting her plight and human rights groups intervening.

Frontier Constabulary (FC) authorities acknowledged that Laiba was injured and paid about 400,000 rupees (4,700 US dollars) for treatment, Khan said.

But because she is growing, Laiba will need a new artificial limb every six months to have any hope of living a normal life.

The family cannot afford the 91,000 rupees (1,076 dollars) for each new prosthetic – although Laiba’s mother works in Britain for the National Health Service and the family is better off than many in Peshawar.

“I don’t want any revenge, no compensation, but only the treatment of my daughter from the best physicians of the world. The security forces must do it,” says Razia Khan, who travels back and forth between Britain and Pakistan.

Major Fazl-ur-Rehman, a spokesman for the FC, told AFP an internal inquiry found that the shots which injured Laiba were not fired by their troops but by “various other forces moving there.”

“Even then we paid for her treatment and offered to buy her an artificial foot purely on humanitarian grounds,” he added.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

Poor child.. i feel sorry for her...

 

[Last Hope]

 

[yyetttt]

How will the Pakistani public feel safe because of this? Please Brothers if you love Pakistan vote for Imran Khan.