ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani child activist shot in the head by the Taleban was airlifted to the country’s top military hospital for specialist treatment yesterday, officials said.

Doctors said she was still in a critical condition.

The shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai on a school bus in the Swat valley has been denounced worldwide and by the Pakistani authorities, who have offered a reward of more than $100,000 for the capture of her attackers.

Two of her school friends were also injured in the attack, carried out as retribution for Malala’s campaign for the right to an education during a two-year Taleban insurgency in Swat that the army claimed to have crushed in 2009.

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 still 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.

US President Barack Obama, UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Pakistani leaders have expressed horror at the attack on a girl who won admiration for daring to speak out during the Taleban insurgency, which the army said it had crushed in 2009.

Obama believed the shooting was “reprehensible and disgusting and tragic”, said White House spokesman Jay Carney.

Separately, Pakistani police said bombing attacks in a restive southwestern province killed eight people — five civilians and three security officials.

Senior police officer Ghulam Aali Lashari says the five civilians died when a bomb ripped through a crowded market in the town of Sibi in Baluchistan province.

He says the attack also wounded 12 people.

Another police official, Shehbaz Khan, says a roadside bomb hit a vehicle carrying security officers in another southwestern town, Dera Bugti, also yesterday. Three officers were killed and two were wounded in that attack.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombings but nationalists in Baluchistan have long waged a low-level insurgency to pressure the government to get more wealth from resources such as natural gas that are extracted from the province.