He shot her until sound stopped: Boy

Hospital security guards carry a student injured in the Peshawar school. (AP)

TT, Peshawar, Dec. 16 (Reuters): Students pored over their books. Teachers ruffled through their notes and gave lectures. It began like any other morning in Pakistan’s Army Public School in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

In an instant, the peace was shattered — gunfire, smoke and dead bodies strewn across the school’s halls and corridors, with crazed militants rushing from room to room shooting randomly at pupils and adults.

As many as 130 children were killed in the daylight attack on the military-run school on Tuesday, an assault lauded by Taliban insurgents as revenge for the killings of their own relatives by the Pakistani army.

Reuters interviews with witnesses showed most victims were shot in the first hours of the assault when gunmen sprayed the premises with bullets in an indiscriminate massacre.

It was possible that some were also killed in the ensuing gunfight with Pakistani armed forces who stormed the building.

The school in Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the edge of the country’s turbulent tribal belt, is operated by the army. Although it enrols some civilian students, many of its pupils are children of army officials, the Taliban’s intended target.

The assault began around 10am local time.

The militants — some said they were wearing Pakistani army uniforms — bypassed the heavily guarded main entrance and slipped in through a less frequently used back entrance, the witnesses added.

Shahrukh Khan, 15, was shot in both legs but survived after hiding under a bench. “One of my teachers was crying, she was shot in the hand and she was crying in pain,” he said as he lay on a bed in Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital.

“One terrorist then walked up to her and started shooting her until she stopped making any sound. All around me my friends were lying injured and dead.”

As the gunfight between the Taliban and Pakistani forces intensified, at least three of the militants blew themselves up, resulting in several charred bodies of bombers and victims.

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

One distraught family member was given a wrong body because the faces of many children were badly burned as a result of the suicide bomb explosions.

Khalid Khan, 13, said he and his classmates were in a first-aid lesson in the main hall when two clean-shaven armed men wearing white clothes and black jackets entered the room.

“They opened fire at the students and then went out. The army doctor and soldiers managed to escape and we locked the doors from inside,” he said. “But very soon they came, broke the doors and entered and again started firing.”

He said many tried to hide under their desks but were shot anyway, adding that there were around 150 students in the hall around the time of the attack. “They killed most of my classmates and then I didn’t know what happened as I was brought to the hospital,” said Khan, breaking down in sobs.

Another student, Jalal Ahmed, 15, could hardly speak, choking with tears, as Reuters approached him at one of the hospitals.

“I am a biochemistry student and I was attending a lecture in our main hall. There are five doors in the hall. After some time we heard someone kicking the back doors. There were gunshots but our teacher told us to be quiet and calmed us down.

“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’.”

A 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 Quran 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.”

Dec. 16: The Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar is part of a nationwide network of elite institutions run under the auspices of the Pakistan Army.

The titular head of such Army Public Schools is the Pakistani chief of army staff (COAS), and they are usually located within cantonment limits.

Students of the institution go with the common motto: “I shall Rise and Shine.”

There are 146 such schools all across Pakistan, all of them administered by a central body called the Army Public Schools and Colleges Systems Secretariat (APSCSS). The essential mandate of the APSCSS is to ensure smooth administration and maintenance of quality standards across the country.

Although their affairs are overseen by the Pakistan Army — and preference is given to children of those that serve in the armed forces — admission to such schools is, at least on paper, open to all.

But they are different from privately-run public schools, of which, too, there are several in Pakistan.

“The army schools are really elite schools where the children of the affluent and the influential go. It is considered a thing of privilege to be able to send your child to one of these schools if you are not in the armed forces,” a senior Islamabad-based journalist told The Telegraph over phone.

“For a lot of students that come from armed forces background, such schools also serve as training grounds, or platforms, to get into the defence services at a later stage,” the journalist added.