The Times veteran walker respondent, Anthony Lloyd, isn't usually a man who notices handbags.

It was a black leather bag, and oddly, it had a label armoured thumb on the side, man and woman.

Various objects came out, and one of the first was a booksheet written on Laura.

It's a highly educated woman. She'd worked in law for more than 30 years.

This was a booksheet written, and I was a bullet hole straight through the middle of it,

which had kind of exploded the back of the book off.

This particular handbag belonged to Gardaria Yassini, a judge in Afghanistan's Supreme Court.

Last month, judge Yassini had been clutching this handbag, shielding behind it,

as a gang of masked gunmen showered her car with bullets.

She was shot in the chest five times, and died on the spot.

Then there was a pair of eyebrow tweezers, which had taken a head-on hit from our pistol bullets,

so they'd been bent into a kind of snake shape.

Then there was a little notebook, everything was punched by bullets.

And there were three bullets sitting in the bag, which had gone in, ricocheted off whatever the tweezers and the book and all the rest of it,

and were still there, so the three spent bullet heads.

Four days after the attack, Anthony Lloyd was in Gardaria Yassini's home,

talking to her grieving sons as they sifted through what was left of their mother's bullet-riddled handbag.

But what I found particularly moving, the boys didn't notice there,

as they leafed through the bullet-punchered book she'd written,

inside was a letter, which it also was folded, a bullet had gone straight through that,

so as they unfolded it, there were four big holes in it,

and it was a mother's day letter that the boys had written to their mom the previous year.

...