Kabul, Sept.5 (ANI): An Indian woman, who wrote a popular memoir about her escape from the Taliban, was shot dead outside her home in Afghanistan's Paktika Province on Thursday.
Sushmita Banerjee was married to an Afghan businessman.
According to the BBC, Banerjee may have been killed by the Taliban for writing a book about her dramatic escape in 1995.
The book became a best-seller in India and was made into a Bollywood film in 2003.
Banerjee had recently moved back to Afghanistan to live with her husband.
Banerjee, who was also known as Sayed Kamala, was working as a health worker in the province and had been filming the lives of local women as part of her work.
Police said Taliban militants arrived at her home in capital, Kharana, tied up her husband and other members of the family, took Sushmita Banerjee out and shot her. They then dumped her body near a religious school.
Banerjee, 49, became well-known in India for her memoir, A Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife, which recounted her life in Afghanistan with her husband Jaanbaz Khan.and her escape.
She was the subject of the 2003 Bollywood film, Escape From Taliban. Starring actress Manisha Koirala, the film described itself as a "story of a woman who dares [the] Taliban".
Banerjee also told her story in an article she wrote for Outlook magazine in 1998. She went to Afghanistan in 1989 after marrying Khan, whom she met in Calcutta.
She wrote that "life was tolerable until the Taliban crackdown in 1993" when the militants ordered her to close a dispensary she was running from her house and "branded me a woman of poor morals".
She wrote that she escaped "sometime in early 1994", but her brothers-in-law tracked her down in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, where she had arrived to seek assistance from the Indian embassy. They took her 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.
It was shortly after that, she wrote, that she tried to escape from her husband's home, three hours from the capital, Kabul. (ANI)
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