ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Army said on Friday authorities had arrested a group of Taleban militants responsible for shooting Malala Yousafzai, a teenage activist in October 2012. Two other schoolgirls were wounded in the attack.

Asim Bajwa, head of the army’s press wing, told reporters that 10 attackers had been identified and arrested.

The detention of the 10 men in a joint operation involving army, police and intelligence agencies came as part of the Pakistani military’s ongoing offensive against the Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP) and other extremist outfits.

“The group involved in the attack on Malala Yousafzai has been arrested,” Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa told a news conference. The 10-member group had a hit list of 22 targets in addition to Malala, all ordered by the TTP’s current leader Fazlullah, Bajwa said.

All its members were from Malakand, close to Mingora, the main town of Swat where Malala was attacked, he said and the leader Zafar Iqbal ran a furniture shop.

Militants shot the teenage activist in the head on her school bus for her outspoken views on girls’ education.

Malala survived and was airlifted to Britain for treatment, and has since become a symbol of defiance in the fight against militants operating in Pashtun tribal areas in northwest Pakistan. She won the EU’s human rights award and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Now based in Britain, she is unable to return to her homeland because of Taleban threats to kill her and her family members.

An address she gave to the UN General Assembly in July last year, in which she vowed she would never be silenced, earned her a standing ovation.

Malala first rose to prominence in 2009, aged just 11, with a blog for the BBC Urdu service chronicling life under Taleban rule in Swat, the beautiful valley in northwestern Pakistan where she lived.

She had become well-known in Pakistan as a young campaigner for girls’ right to attend school after the Taleban took control of Swat in 2007, speaking out against the militants’ ban on female education and their bombing of local schools. In her autobiography published last year, she described receiving death threats in the months before the attack.

“At night I would wait until everyone was asleep,” she writes.