MINGORA, Pakistan A Taliban gunman walked up to and including bus taking children home from soccer practice in Pakistan's volatile Swat Valley on Tuesday and shot and wounded a 14-year-old activist noted for championing the education of girls and publicizing atrocities committed by the Taliban, authorities stated.

The attack in the town of Mingora specific 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai, who's broadly respected on her work to advertise the schooling of girls -- something which the Taliban strongly opposes. She was nominated this past year for the Worldwide Children's Peace Prize.

The Taliban stated responsibility for the attack, calling Malala's work "obscenity."

"It was a brand new chapter of obscenity, and we need to finish this chapter," stated Taliban spokesperson Ahsanullah Ahsan on the phone. "We have completed this attack."

The chartered bus was going to leave the school grounds in Mingora whenever a bearded guy contacted it and requested which one of the girls was Malala, stated Rasool Shah, the police chief in the town. Another girl pointed to Malala, but the activist refused it had been her and the gunmen then shot each of the girls, the police chief stated.

Malala was shot two times -- once in the mind and once in the neck -- but her wounds weren't existence-threatening, stated Tariq Mohammad, a physician at the primary hospital in Mingora. The second girl shot was at stable condition, the physician stated. Pakistani television demonstrated pictures of Malala being taken by helicopter to some military hospital in the frontier town of Peshawar.

In the past, the Taliban has threatened Malala and her family on her activism. When she was just 11 years of age, she started writing your blog within pseudonym for the BBC's Urdu service about existence under Taliban occupation. After the Taliban were thrown from the Swat Valley in the summer of 2009, she started speaking out openly about the militant group and the need for girls' education.

While chairing a session of the children's set up based on UNICEF in the valley this past year, the then-13-year-old championed a larger role for youthful people.

"Girl people play an energetic role," she stated, based on articles on the U.N. organization's website. "We have outlined important issues concerning children, especially marketing girls' education in Swat."

The attack displayed the viciousness of Islamic militants in the Swat Valley, where the military carried out a significant operation in '09 to obvious out insurgents. It had been a indication of the challenges the government faces to keep the area free from militant influence.

The scenic valley -- nicknamed the Europe of Pakistan -- was once a well known tourist place to go for Pakistanis, and newly-weds on their honeymoon accustomed to vacation in the numerous hotels dotted along the river running through Swat. But the Taliban's near-total takeover of the valley just 175 miles (280 kilometers) from the capital in 2008 shocked many Pakistanis, who considered militancy to become a far-away condition in Afghanistan or Pakistan's rugged tribal regions.

Militants started saying their influence in Swat in 2007 -- a part of a wave of Al Qaeda and Taliban martial artists growing their achieve from safe havens near the Afghan border. By 2008 they controlled a lot of the valley and started shelling out their very own make of justice.

They forced men to develop beards, restricted women from likely to the bazaar, whipped women they considered immoral and beheaded competitors.

Throughout the roughly two many years of their rule, Taliban in the region destroyed about 200 schools. Most were girls' institutions, though some prominent boys' schools were struck too.

At one point, the Taliban stated these were halting female education, a move that echoed their militant brethren in neighboring Afghanistan who throughout their rule barred girls from while attending college.

While the Pakistani military handled to purge out the insurgents throughout the military operation, their Taliban's top leadership steered clear of, departing many of the valley's citizens on edge.

Kamila Hayat, a senior official of the Human Privileges Commission of Pakistan, recognized Malala for standing to the militants and delivering a note across the world that Pakistani girls had the courage to battle for his or her privileges. But she also worried that Tuesday's shooting would prevent other parents from letting their kids speak out against the Taliban.

"It is really an attack to silence courage via a bullet," Hayat stated. "They are the forces who want to consider us to the dark age range."

The issues of young women in Pakistan were also the focus of the separate situation before the high court, which purchased a probe into an alleged barter of seven girls to stay a bloodstream feud inside a remote north western district. Such feuds in Pakistan's tribal areas frequently arise from disputes between families or tribes and may last decades.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry started proceedings into the accusations, that have been first reported in the local media. The alleged trade happened in the Dera Bugti district of Baluchistan province between two groups within the Bugti tribe, one of the more prominent in the province.

A tribal council purchased the barter at the begining of September, the district deputy commissioner, Saeed Faisal, told the court. He would never know the girls' age range but local media reported these were between 4 and 13 years of age.

However, the Advocate General for the province couldn't confirm the incident.

Chaudhry, the chief justice, purchased Faisal to make sure that all people of the tribal council appear in the court on Wednesday, in addition to a local lawmaker who goes to one of the two sub-tribes thought involved with the incident.

The tradition of families swapping unmarried girls to stay feuds is banned under Pakistani law but nonetheless practiced in the country's more conservative, tribal areas.