I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

by Malala Yousafzai

But two years after I was born the generals again took over. It happened in a manner so dramatic that it sounds like something out of a movie. Nawaz Sharif was prime minister at the time and had fallen out with his army chief General Pervez Musharraf and sacked him. At the time General Musharraf was on a plane of our national airline PIA coming back from Sri Lanka. Nawaz Sharif was so worried about his reaction that he tried to stop the plane from landing in Pakistan. He ordered Karachi airport to switch off its landing lights and to park fire engines on the runway to block the plane even though it had 200 other passengers on board and not enough fuel to get to another country. Within an hour of the announcement on television of Musharraf’s sacking, tanks were on the streets and troops had taken over the newsrooms and the airports. The local commander, General Iftikhar, stormed the control tower at Karachi so that Musharraf’s plane could land. Musharraf then seized power and threw Sharif into a dungeon in Attock Fort.