HANG YOUR HEADS IN SHAME, HUMANS 132 kids slaughtered in Pak

Two schoolchildren rescued from the Army Public School in Peshawar being escorted by a
soldier on Tuesday. (Reuters)

NASIR JAFFRY AND REUTERS, TT, Islamabad, Dec. 16: Pakistan was tonight preparing to bury the flower of a generation: 132 children killed in a Peshawar school in a terror attack whose savagery appeared unparalleled because of the abrupt and cold-blooded manner in which it was executed.

Altogether 148 people — 132 children, nine employees and seven terrorists — had been killed by the time the eight-hour siege of the Army Public School and Graduate College ended in the evening.

Officials said 121 pupils and three staff members were wounded. A local hospital said the dead and injured were aged between 10 and 20.

The Taliban gunmen broke into the school just when the world was recovering from the “lone-wolf” stand-off in Sydney 24 hours ago.

The terrorists made no demands and started killing children as soon as they entered the building, the chief military spokesperson said. “They didn’t take any hostages initially and started firing in the hall,” said Maj. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa.

But the militants had brought rations for several days, he said, implying that they may have intended to take students hostage. It is not clear whether and why the plans were changed.

Pakistanis, used to almost daily militant attacks, were shocked by the scale of the massacre and the loss of so many young lives. The massacre recalled the 2004 siege of a school in Russia’s Beslan by Chechen militants that ended in the death of more than 330 people, half of them children. In Beslan, the children were taken hostage and the crisis had spilled over to three days and some questions remain unanswered on what triggered the explosions that killed many hostages.

In Peshawar, wounded children taken to nearby hospitals told Reuters that most of the victims died when gunmen, suicide vests strapped to their bodies, entered the compound and opened fire indiscriminately on boys, girls and their teachers.

The corridors of the city’s Combined Military Hospital were lined with dead students, their green-and-yellow school uniform ties peeping out of the white body bags.

The Pakistan Taliban, waging war in order to topple the government, immediately claimed responsibility.

The face of a student who was killed in the attack in Peshawar is seen through
the coffin?s lid. (Reuters)

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesperson Muhammad Umar Khorasani. “We want them to feel the pain.”

The Pakistani Taliban had vowed to step up attacks in response to a major army operation against the insurgents in the tribal areas in June.

So far, the Taliban have targeted mainly security forces, military bases and airports. Attacks on civilian targets with no logistical significance are relatively rare, though many children were killed in an attack on a church, also in Peshawar, last year.

Despite the crackdown this year, the military has long been accused of being too lenient towards militants who critics say are used to carry out its bidding in places such as Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Some witnesses said the gunmen addressed each other in a language they could only recognise as either Arabic or Farsi — a possible testament to the Taliban’s network of hundreds of foreign fighters holed up with them in the remote mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The terrorists managed to slip past the school’s tight security because at least some of them were wearing Pakistani military uniforms, the witnesses said.

Around 960 pupils and staff members were evacuated from the school attended by over 1,100 people, many of them children of army personnel.

The attack struck at the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment and could push the armed forces into a more drastic response. “These terrorists have struck the heart of the nation. But our resolve to tackle this menace has gotten a new lease of life. We will pursue these monsters and their facilitators until they are eliminated for good,” army chief Raheel Sharif said.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif used similarly strong words. “We will take revenge for each and every drop of our children’s blood that was spilt today,” he said.

Bajwa, the military spokesperson, suggested Afghanistan, from where Pakistan Taliban chief Maulana Fazlullah is said to be operating, would no longer be a safe haven. “We will chase even sympathisers, facilitators and abettors of these militants,” the officer said.

The Afghan Taliban, separate from the Pakistan Taliban, condemned the attack as “against the basics of Islam”.

India gesture

New Delhi responded with sensitivity, going beyond the usual platitudes. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Nawaz Sharif, expressed condolences and told him that India was “ready to provide all assistance during this hour of grief”.

Modi appealed to students in all schools in India to observe silence for two minutes on Wednesday as a mark of solidarity