The
Army Public School and Degree College is home to about 1100 students and staff,
most of them sons and daughters of army personnel from around Peshawar though
others attend as well. The boys and girls attend classes in different buildings
on the compound.
They
were in the middle of their school day when a car exploded behind the school Students said gunmen proceeded to walk through where
students in grades 8, 9 and 10 have classes and fired out randomly.
Seventh-grader
Mohammad Bilal said he was sitting outside his classroom taking a math test
when the gunfire erupted. He fell into bushes before running to the school's
gates to safety. Ahmed,
the 14-year-old student, remembered being in the school's auditorium when four
or five people burst in through a back door "and started rapidly
firing." After getting shot in his left shoulder, the ninth-grader lay
under a bench. "My
shoulder was peeking out of the bench, and somebody was following," Ahmed
recalled. "They went into another room, (and when) I ran to the exit, I
fell." Bajwa
told reporters that Pakistani security forces reached the school 15 minutes
after the attack began. They
found, he said, "the children ... drenched in blood, with their bodies on
top of each other." Most
of those killed were between the ages of 12 and 16, said Pervez Khattak, chief
minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital. But
some adults in the school also were targets, like a 28-year-old office
assistant who was shot and then burned alive, police official Faisal Shehzad
said. By
8:30 p.m., Lady Reading Hospital had already taken in 31 dead boys, plus the
body of one of the attackers, Bilal said. Another 45 came in injured -- some
with gunshot wounds all over their bodies, though 20 were discharged within a
few hours. It
is the home base the TTP, an organization that has sought to force its
conservative version of Islam in Pakistan. They have battled Pakistani troops
and, on a number of occasions, attacked civilians as well. Peshawar,
an ancient city of more than 3 million people tucked right up against the
Khyber Pass, has often found itself in the center of it all. Militants
repeatedly targeted the city in response to Pakistani military offensives, like
a 2009 truck bombing of a popular marketplace frequented by women and children
that killed more than 100 people. And
the Taliban hasn't hesitated to go after schoolchildren. Their most notable
target is Malala Yousafzai, who was singled out and shot on October 9, 2012.
The teenage girl survived and, last week, became the youngest recipient of the
Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote education and girls rights in
Pakistan and beyond.
Yousafzai
said Tuesday she was "heartbroken by this (latest) senseless and cold
blooded act of terror in Peshawar."
"Innocent
children in their school have no place in horror such as this," the
16-year-old said.
Taliban:
Revenge for killing of tribesmen
Still,
even by Pakistan and the Taliban's gruesome standards, Tuesday's attack may be
the most abominable yet.
This
is the deadliest incident inside Pakistan since October 2007, when about 139
Pakistanis died and more than 250 others were wounded in an attack near a
procession for exiled former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, according
to the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database.
It
comes after some signs that peace could be possible. As recently as last
spring, the Pakistan Taliban -- a group closely affiliated with the Taliban in
Afghanistan and whose members swear allegiance to the Afghan group's leader,
Mullah Omar -- and Pakistan's government were involved in talks. The government
released 19 Taliban noncombatants in a goodwill gesture, in fact. But
talks broke down under a wave of attacks by the Taliban and mounting political
pressure to bring the violence under control.
In
September 2013, choir members and children attending Sunday school were among
81 people killed in a suicide bombing at the Protestant All Saints Church of
Pakistan. A splinter group of the Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility for
the church attack, blaming the U.S. program of drone strikes in tribal areas of
the country.
And
for the past few months, the Pakistani military has been conducting a ground
offensive to clear out militants, a campaign that's displaced tens of thousands
of people and spurred deadly retaliations.
Khurrassani,
the Pakistan Taliban spokesman, told CNN that the latest attack was revenge for
the killing of hundreds of innocent tribesmen during repeated army operations
in provinces including South Waziristan, North Waziristan and the Khyber
Agency.
The
TTP spokesman challenged that ordinary citizens were targeted, saying that five
army vehicles are routinely stationed at the school.
"We are facing such heavy nights in routine," Khurrassani said, rationalizing the siege shortly before it ended. "Today, you must face the heavy night."
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