Malala Yousafzai recalls shooting, keeps speaking out

Almost a year to the day after Taliban gunman boarded a school bus in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, shouting "Who is Malala?" before turning a gun on a 15-year-old girl and shooting her point-blank in the head, Malala Yousafzai hasn't let continued threats silence her.

Two months ago, now aged 16, Malala stood up at the United Nations and addressed a youth assembly. This week, she could become the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

"I am still the old Malala," she said, of her new life as a world-renowned advocate for equality and girls' education. "I still try to live normally but yes, my life has changed a lot."

When she was shot, on Oct. 9, 2012, Malala was already beginning to become famous. She was outspoken, especially for a teenager, and wrote an anonymous diary for BBC Urdu, detailing the life of a girl trying to get an education in Taliban-controlled Swat Valley where girls aren't permitted to go to school.

"I wasn’t scared,” Malala writes in her autobiography "I Am Malala," to be released Tuesday, “but I had started making sure the gate was locked at night and asking God what happens when you die.”

In her book, she recalls trying to plan in the event she was targeted.

“Maybe I’d take off my shoes and hit him,” she recalled. “But then I’d think that if I did that, there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, ‘Okay, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I’m not against you personally. I just want every girl to go to school.’”

But when the moment came, there wasn't time to plead.

“My friends say he fired three shots," she wrote. "The first went through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder. I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the other two bullets hit the girls next to me…My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired.”

Malala lives in England still, where she was taken after the shooting for treatment and recuperation, but she remains in danger.

On Monday, the Taliban renewed its threats against her.

"She accepted that she attacked Islam so we we tried to kill her, and if we get another chance we will definitely kill her and that will make us feel proud," said Taliban spokesman Shahidullah Shahid. "Islam prohibits killing women, but except those that support the infidels in their war against our religion."

But the threats, Malala said, won't keep her from her home forever.

"I hope that a day will come when the people of Pakistan will be free, they will have their rights, there will be peace, and every girl and every boy will be going to school," she said.