Pakistan Taliban school attack kills 141, including 132 children
We’re going to wrap our live coverage of the attack in Pakistan with a summary; you can also read a wrap of the attack and military counterstrike by Jon Boone and Ewan MacAskill here.
- The Pakistani Taliban killed 141 people, including 132 children, in an attack on an army run school in Peshawar, a city in the country’s north-west. The attack was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history.
- Pakistani special forces mounted a rescue operation and battled the militants in the school, ending the siege and clearing the building of explosives. The army said there were seven terrorists, all wearing suicide jackets, and that the militants sought no demands but only to kill students.
- Prime minister Nawaz Sharif travelled to Peshawar and the army launched at least 10 air strikes on the Taliban. Sharif called the attack a national tragedy and promised to eradicate the terrorists. “These are my children and it is my loss,” he said. He announced three days of national mourning.
- Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan said it attacked the army-run school in retaliation for a government offensive in the north: “This is a reaction to the killing of our children and dumping of bodies of our mujahideen,” a spokesman said.
- Hospitals are overwhelmed by the injured and dead, and survivors have recounted horrific episodes of the assault.
- Leaders around the world, from Indian prime minister Narendra to US president Barack Obama, condemned the attack in the strongers terms. Pakistani Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who also survived a Taliban attack, said she was “heartbroken by this senseless and cold-blooded act of terror”.
Several children who survived have told wrenching, horrific stories to Reuters. Some describe the militants as speaking either Arabic or Farsi, others describe lying among their peers as the gunmen swept through rooms, and still more evince the untold scars that the experience has left them with.
World leaders have condemned the attack in the strongest possible terms, from UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, who said TTP “bears no resemblance to any religion or any cultural norm, to US secretary of state John Kerry, who declared the children killed “the world’s loss”.One student, Jalal Ahmed, 15, could hardly speak, choking with tears: “I am a biochemistry student and I was attending a lecture in our main hall. After some time we heard someone kicking the back doors. Then the men came with big guns.”Ahmed started to cry. Standing next to his bed, his father, Mushtaq Ahmed, said: “He keeps screaming: ‘take me home, take me home, they will come back and kill me.’”One nine-year-old boy, who asked not to be named because he was too afraid to be identified, said teachers shepherded his class out through a back door as soon as the shooting began.“The teacher asked us to recite from the Koran quietly,” he said. “When we came out from the back door there was a crowd of parents who were crying. When I saw my father he was also crying.”
The army is still clearing explosive devices left at the school, per Pakistan’s Home Department.
“Schools have long been in the Taliban’s crosshairs,” the Guardian’s south Asia correspondent Jason Burke writes, in an analysis of the Peshawar attack.
More than a thousand have been destroyed by Islamist militants from one faction or another in the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in the past five years. The institutions both symbolise government authority and are seen as un-Islamic. This school is at the edge of a military “cantonment” in Peshawar, the capital of the province, and inevitably many students are the children of servicemen.The attack reinforces the impression of a civilian and military leadership simply unable to ensure the security of Pakistan’s 180-million-plus citizens and will further raise growing concerns about the security environment across south Asia. This is of course, at least in part, the aim of the militants.
The backdrop is the continuing power struggle in Pakistan between the army generals and the elected if imperfect civilian government. On Tuesday Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, and Raheel Sharif, the army chief, both flew to Peshawar. They did not travel together. Both said they wanted to oversee operations in person.
Jason goes on to describe how one of the main concerns in the US and elsewhere is Pakistan’s “selective” attitude to Islamist militants, and mutual suspicion reigns among officials in Kabul, Delhi, Islamabad and Washington.
Caught in the crossfire in the middle of this maelstrom of violence and politics are the children.
Buzzfeed’s Sheera Frenkel also writes that more than 1,000 schools in Pakistan have been targeted for terrorist attacks since 2009, quoting human rights groups . You can read Jason’s full dispatch here.
Updated
Army spokesman Asim Bajwa reiterates that the Taliban made no demands: “they started killing children as soon as they entered the school.”
Bajwa says that Pakistan’s army will “resolutely identify all sympathizers and facilitators of the terrorists, and will hunt them down finish them all until they are killed.”
Pakistan’s army chief, General Raheel Sharif, says “terrorists have attacked the heart of our country.”
Updated
The press conference with the army spokesman continues: “The terrorists had a stock of weapons and food. They had plans to maintain the siege for a long time.”
“They did not come with the intention to take hostages. Their purpose was to kill children.”
Pakistan army: 141 killed
Pakistan’s Major General Asim Bajwa has told reporters that 132 children and nine staff members died today, increasing the civilian death toll at 141.
He says there were seven militants, all wearing suicide jackets, and that several special forces soldiers were wounded in the fighting.
“The terrorists used a ladder to cross the school walls from the graveyard behind the school. The terrorists and the Pakistani army fought in the administrative block of the school.”
He says 960 students and staff were saved in the rescue operation, and that 121 children were wounded during the attack.
The death toll has now surpassed the previous worst terrorist attack in Pakistan’s history, the attack in Karachi in 2007, making the Peshawar raid the deadliest in the nation’s history.
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