Nat Geo’s Afghan girl denies getting fake ID

Famed green-eyed ‘Afghan Girl’ Sharbat Gula, arrested for staying in Pakistan on fake identity, on Friday denied that she fraudulently obtained Pakistani nationality.

Sharbat, who was immortalised in 1985 when the National Geographic magazine published her haunting picture on its cover, was produced before a court, headed by Judicial Magistrate Muhammad Jamil. She refused retracted the confession that she had made after her arrest to the FIA investigators.

The Judge asked her “Do you confess to making faking ID card?”  “No,” Sharbat, now in her 40s, said.

The court sent her on judicial remand to the Central Jail in Peshawar. She was detained in Peshawar on charges of holding a fake Pakistani identity card.

Dubbed as the ‘Mona Lisa of the Afghan war’, Sharbat catapulted into global prominence after National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry captured her iconic picture when she was 12 years old at the Nisar Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar in 1984. 

She had migrated to Pakistan, after the situation in Afghanistan worsened and married a Pakistani man.