Afghan 'girl with the green eyes' who became famous in iconic National Geographic front cover is arrested in Pakistan for living on fraudulent ID papers

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Afghan woman Sharbat Gula is pictured waiting ahead of a court hearing in Peshawar

An Afghan woman immortalised on a celebrated National Geographic magazine cover as a green-eyed 12-year-old girl was arrested Wednesday for living in Pakistan on fraudulent identity papers.

The haunting image of Sharbat Gula, taken in a Pakistan refugee camp by photographer Steve McCurry in 1984, became the most famous cover image in the magazine's history.

She now faces up to 14 years in jail, a Pakistani official warned.

Gula, now in her 40s, was arrested by Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for fraud following a two-year-long investigation in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, which borders Afghanistan.

'FIA arrested Sharbat Gula, an Afghan woman, today for obtaining a fake ID card,' Shahid Ilyas, an official of the National Database Registration Authority (NADRA), told AFP.

Ilyas said that FIA is also seeking three NADRA officials who were found responsible for issuing Pakistan's national identity card to Gula, who have been at large since the fraud was detected.

'Afghan Girl' Sharbat Gula was first photographed by Steve Curry in 1984 in a refugee camp, when she was 12-years-old

He said that Gula faces seven to 14 years prison time and fine between $3,000 to $5,000 if convicted by court over fraud.

However, family members were quick to her defence and claim she is victim of the war-torn regions instabilities and is a refugee. 

'Sharbat Gula was ready to repatriate to her father's village in Afghanistan in early summer this year,' a relative of Gula told CBS News.

'But the residents of her native village left … due to ISIS,' they added.

'Her Pakistan ID was already blocked one year back … She thought the case had been closed. She is a simple, illiterate lady,' he said.

In reality she is unlikely to serve such a harsh sentence - many Afghans who have been convicted in similar cases have been deported before they could be sent to prison. 

Pakistani officials say that Gula applied for a Pakistani identity card in Peshawar in April 2014, using the name Sharbat Bibi.

She was one of thousands of Afghan refugees who managed to dodge Pakistan's computerised system to get an identity card.

The original image of Gula was taken in 1984 in a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan at the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

McCurry later tracked her down, after a 17-year search, to a remote Afghan village in 2002 where she was married to a baker and the mother of three daughters.

As a Muslim, she was not allowed to meet McCurry because he was a man and not a member of her family.

National Geographic then sent a female associate of McCurry's to meet her and take another set of pictures instead.

The haunting image became the most famous cover image in the magazine's history

The venerable magazine employed high-tech iris-scanning technology and utilized face-recognition techniques to confirm it was the same person McCurry photographed in 1984.

When her family realized the importance of McCurry's return mission they granted him permission to see her again.

When they came face to face, McCurry said he knew it was her immediately because of her startling eyes.

'I don't think she was particularly interested in her personal fame,' said McCurry in 2002. 'But she was pleased when we said she had come to be a symbol of the dignity and resilience of her people.'

Last year, another picture of her computerized national identity card surfaced in Pakistan. It is a card that as an Afghan national she was not allowed to have and was obtained with her fake name.

In her official registration with NADRA, Gula told authorities she was born in January 1969 and gave Peshawar as her place of residence.

The photo attached to the application had the same piercing green eyes and the same sculpted face seen in McCurry's famous image only olde, lined by age and surrounded by a black hijab covering her hair completely.

An AFP reporter visited the poor Peshawar neighborhood given as Gula's address in her papers, where residents said she had been living with her husband, who worked in local bakery, but had left a month ago.

A senior official in NADRA's Peshawar office, where the cards were issued, confirmed last year that she was under investigation and told the AFP that Sharbat Bibi and her two sons Rauf Khan and Wali Khan were issued cards on the same day. 

Photograph of a lifetime: US photographer Steve McCurry poses next to his photos of the 'Afghan Girl' named Sharbat Gula at the opening of the 'Overwhelmed by Life' exhibition of his work at the Museum for Art and Trade in Hamburg, northern Germany on June 27, 2013

Memories: Steve McCurry with his most famous work and pictures taken of Sharbat Gula later in her troubled life 

He said all the documents she used to get the card, which only Pakistani citizens are entitled to, were fake and her 'sons' were likely also not related to her.

Pakistan has launched a crackdown against those who have obtained fake ID cards fraudulently and launched a reverification campaign across the country.

Officials say NADRA has so far reverified 91 million ID cards and detected 60,675 cards by non nationals fraudulently.

Return: Photographer Steve McCurry went back to Afghanistan in 2002 to find her

A NADRA official told AFP that 2,473 foreigners, mostly Afghans, had voluntarily surrendered their ID cards which they obtained fraudulently.

Some 18 officials of the authority were under investigation for issuing ID cards to foreigners and eight were arrested, the official said.

More than 350,000 Afghan refugees have returned to their war-torn homeland from Pakistan this year, UN data shows, with the torrent of people crossing the border expected to continue.

Pakistan has for decades provided safe haven for millions of Afghans who fled their country after the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Pakistan hosts 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees, according to UNHCR figures from earlier this year, making it the third-largest refugee hosting nation in the world. A further one million unregistered refugees are estimated to be in the country.

Since 2009, Islamabad has repeatedly pushed back a deadline for them to return, but fears are growing that the latest cutoff date in March 2017 will be final.