Indian Author Sushmita Banerjee Shot Dead by Suspected Taliban Militants in Afghanistan

Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, who wrote a famous memoir A Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife describing her escape from the clutches of Taliban, has been executed by a suspected Taliban militant group on Wednesday.

Although the exact cause behind the execution is not known, it is speculated the reason was Banerjee's non-stop social work for Afghan women's healthcare and upliftment which irked the fundamentalist outfit.

According to reports, the 49-year-old was dragged out of her husband's house in Kharana in Paktita province, while her family was tied up by turbaned militants. She was shot dead outside her home and her body was dumped near a religious school.

"We found her bullet-riddled body near a madrassa on the outskirts of Sharan city this morning," provincial police chief Dawlat Khan Zadran said according to ABC.net.

"She had been shot 20 times and some of her hair had been ripped off by the militants," he added.

The Indian-Bengali writer, born in Kolkata, India, converted to Islam when she got married to an Afghan Business man Jaanbaz Khan. She fled to Afghanistan with her husband and renamed herself Sayeda Kamala, but retained her Indian citizenship.

Banerjee's memoir about her dramatic escape from Taliban militants in 1995 had also inspired a Bollywood movie in 2003, Escape from Taliban, starring Indian actress Monisha Koirala.

According to a report in BBC, Banerjee recently was working as a health worker and her work required her to film the lives of local women.

Though it is believed that Taliban is responsible for Banerjee's death, the group has denied any such allegation.

In an article Banerjee wrote for Outlook magazine in 1998, she described how life was during her stay in Afghanistan.

"Life was tolerable until the Taliban crackdown in 1993," until she was asked by the militants to shut down a dispensary she ran and was branded as a woman of poor morals, she wrote.

Though she managed to escape in early 1994 she was tracked down by her brothers-in-law from Pakistan, where she was hiding and taken back to Afghanistan.

"They promised to send me back to India. But they did not keep their promise. Instead, they kept me under house arrest and branded me an immoral woman. The Taliban threatened to teach me a lesson. I knew I had to escape," she wrote.