The Pakistani Taliban shot a teenage children’s rights activist in the head on her school bus yesterday to avenge her campaigns for the right to an education in the militants’ former stronghold of Swat.

Many in Pakistan reacted with shock and revulsion to the shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who was flown to intensive care in the northwestern city of Peshawar where doctors were struggling to save her life last night.

Police said two other girls were also wounded in the attack on Malala’s school bus, which the Taliban claimed, saying anyone who spoke out against them would suffer a similar fate.

A team of senior doctors late yesterday completed her medical examination in a combined military hospital (CMH) and stated her condition as critical.

“We have thoroughly examined her, she is in critical condition. The bullet travelled from her head and then lodged in the back shoulder, near the neck,” a doctor in the CMH told AFP, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to media.

“The next three to four days are important for her life. She is in the intensive care unit and semi-conscious, although not on the ventilator,” he said.

Earlier another doctor in Saidu Sharif Medical Complex in Mingora had said the bullet penetrated her skull but missed her brain, leaving her out of danger.

Malala won international recognition for highlighting Taliban atrocities in Swat with a blog for the BBC three years ago, when the Islamist militants led by radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah burned girls’ schools and terrorised the valley.

Her struggle resonated with tens of thousands of girls who were being denied an education by Islamist militants across northwest Pakistan, where the government has been fighting local Taliban since 2007.

She received the first-ever national peace award from the Pakistani government last year, and was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by advocacy group Kids Rights Foundation in 2011.

Yesterday’s shooting in broad daylight in Mingora, the main town of the once much-loved valley, raises serious questions about security more than three years after the army claimed to have crushed a Taliban insurgency.