"Day of Prayer" Nation prays for Malala's recovery

People across the country are observing Friday as a "day of prayer" for teenage rights activist Malala Yousufzai, who is in the critical care unit at a military hospital after being shot in the head during an assassination attempt by the Taliban. Special prayers were offered during the morning assembly at all educational institutions for Malala and her two friends who were injured in Tuesday s attack, Dunya News reported. In Lahore, over 50 clerics and scholars of the Sunni Ittehad Council issued a collective fatwa that described the attack on Malala as an un-Islamic act that violated Shariah or Islamic law. The shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai on a school bus in the Swat valley has been denounced worldwide and by the Pakistani authorities. But as she spent a second day in intensive care, questions are mounting about how the attack could have happened in the first place and how the perpetrators simply walked away in an area with a police and army presence. "Now she needs post surgery care. The doctors recommended that AFIC (Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology) has better facilities for post-surgery care," military spokesman Major General Asim Saleem Bajwa told AFP. Another official later confirmed she had arrived by helicopter in Rawalpindi, the twin city of the capital Islamabad and the headquarters of the Pakistan army. Bajwa said Malala was unconscious and that the next 24 hours would be crucial. On Wednesday, she underwent an operation to remove the bullet from between her shoulders in a military hospital in the northwestern city of Peshawar. "She has been put on a ventilator for two days. The bullet has affected some part of the brain, but there is a 70 percent chance that she will survive," one of her doctors, Mumtaz Khan, told AFP. Mehmoodul Hasan, one of Malala`s relatives, said the family had been told doctors were sending her medical reports abroad for advice. "They are checking if better facilities are available in the UK or Dubai or any other country, then they will decide about sending her abroad, otherwise they will treat her here," said Hasan. Malala won international prominence after highlighting Taliban atrocities in Swat with a blog for the BBC three years ago, when the militants burned girls schools and terrorised the valley before the army intervened. She was just 11 then, and her struggle resonated with tens of thousands of girls denied an education by militants across northwest Pakistan, where the government has been fighting local Taliban since 2007. The provincial government announced a 10 million rupee ($104,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of Malala s attackers and Interior Minister Rehman Malik has promised to catch the gunmen. He appealed to Pakistanis to pray for Malala s recovery on Friday, when Muslims say their main weekly prayers at mosques. In northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where the attack took place, provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said that civil servants and schools would observe a one-minute silence on Friday to remember acts of terrorism. Officers in Swat say dozens of people were rounded up after the attack but no one has been charged.