After Taliban helped Charlotte Bellis, a pregnant journalist who was unable to return home due to New Zealand’s Covid-19 strict border policy, the country’s government have offered her a pathway to home amid the outcry.
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said Bellis had been offered a voucher for a room.
"There is a place in managed isolation and quarantine for Ms Bellis and I urge her to take it up," he told reporters at a daily Covid briefing.
“I will be returning to my home country New Zealand at the beginning of March to give birth to our baby girl,” Bellis said in a statement.
“We are so excited to return home and be surrounded by family and friends at such a special time.”
Her case had quickly become an embarrassment to New Zealand, which has thousands of citizens waiting abroad for space to open in the military-run border quarantine hotels.
Bellis, 35, had worked as an Afghanistan correspondent for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network. She resigned in November because it is illegal to be pregnant and unmarried in Qatar.
Bellis then flew to Belgium, trying to get residency in the home country of her partner, freelance photographer Jim Huylebroek, who has lived in Afghanistan for two years. But Bellis said the length of the process would have left her in Belgium with an expired visa.
