THE first Afghan woman to appear on television after the fall of the Taliban has fled the country, saying it is too dangerous, as her husband was shot dead outside their house.

Paween Mushtakhel, 41, and her two children left Afghanistan on Friday. Hours later, under intense pressure from critics worldwide, President Hamid Karzai promised to review new laws that are said in effect to legalise marital rape in the Shi’ite minority.

Those laws had angered Nato countries weighing up US calls for more troops. From London to Ottawa, officials questioned whether they should risk their soldiers’ lives to bolster an Afghan government that not only failed to protect women but was also planning to reverse their hard-won freedoms.

“When the Taliban went I thought things were getting better for women,” said Paween. “Now I think it won’t change for a long time.”

One of the country’s leading actresses, Paween is among a number of prominent Afghan women who have been forced to leave the country in recent months. Others include a leading policewoman who received a letter from the Taliban saying she had been sentenced to death. The letter said she would be next after Malalai Kakar, head of the crimes against women unit in Kandahar, who was gunned down with her son last September.

Paween began her career aged 19 but fled to Pakistan when the mujaheddin entered Kabul in 1992 and closed the theatres. She later returned and married a taxi driver from Khost, with whom she had a son and daughter, now aged eight and seven.

When the Taliban fell she seized the opportunity to be the first woman to appear on TV. “Others were scared but I thought it was good to show the way,” she explained.

Her own family did not agree. “My sisters cut me off, saying, ‘Why are you appearing on TV? Being an actress in this country is like being a whore’.”

Last summer she appeared in a production of the Shakespeare comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, staged by a French director, after which she began to receive death threats. People in turbans came on motorbikes, saying: “Don’t act or you’ll be killed.” Her husband was also threatened. “They told him, ‘You pimp, letting your wife on TV. If you’re a real man you’ll beat her and kick her and take her back to Khost’.”

One night, as Paween came out of Ariana TV, she was knocked down by a bike. Then, as she prepared dinner at home, her husband went out for firewood. She thought she heard shots, but because there were lots of fireworks at the time, she took little notice. By 11pm he had still not returned. Paween said: “I did not sleep all night. I knew something had happened.”

At 9am a local elder told her she should go to the police station, and 200 yards from their house she saw her husband’s bullet-riddled body.

When she tried to register a case with the police, they asked for a bribe. She took her children into hiding and spent three months trying to get help. Eventually she ended up at the national security office, where she was warned off, on pain of also ending up dead.

“What can I do but run away?” she asked. Paween is now in Pakistan and hopes to request asylum in Canada. Her story adds weight to the fury of Nato officials over the laws from the Shi’ite minority, which would limit the rights of women, apparently in a bid to secure clerics’ votes in the coming election. Women will also need their husband’s permission to leave their home, just as in Taliban times.

“We are there to defend universal values and when I see a law threatening to come into effect which fundamentally violates women’s rights . . . that worries me,” said Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato secretary-general.

Karzai said he had ordered the justice ministry to review the law, together with scholars and religious leaders. “Measures would be taken” if it contravened the country’s constitution or sharia, he said.

He complained that western media had mistranslated one part of the law, which appeared to restrict a woman’s right to leave her home. However, he did not mention another article that governs sexual relations between Shi’ite men and their wives, which the United Nations claims amounts to “legalised rape”.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president