(Reuters) — At least 132 students and nine staff members were killed on Tuesday (December16) when Taliban gunmen broke into a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and opened fire, an army spokesman said, in the bloodiest massacre the country has seen for years.
“In the rescue operation today, around 960 children and staff members were rescued from here. I have given you the casualty figures, but I will repeat it again for your knowledge that 132 children and nine staff members were martyred. And around 121 children , which includes three staff members, were injured and are being treated in the Lady Reading Hospital and CMH (Combined Military Hospital) ,” military spokesman major-general Asim Saleem Bajwa told reporters inPeshawar.
More than eight hours after militants slipped into the heavily guarded compound through a back entrance, the army declared the operation to flush them out over, and said that all nine insurgents had been killed.
The attack on a military-run high school attended by more than 1,100 people, many of them children of army personnel, struck at the heart of Pakistan‘s military establishment, an assault certain to enrage the country’s powerful army.
Wounded children taken to nearby hospitals told Reuters most victims died when gunmen, suicide vests strapped to their bodies, entered the compound and opened fire indiscriminately on boys, girls and their teachers.
As night fell on Peshawar, a teeming, volatile city near the Afghan border, security forces wrapped up an operation that lasted more than eight hours and involved intense gun battles.
Pakistanis, used to almost daily militant attacks, were shocked by the scale of the massacre and the loss of so many young lives. It recalled the 2004 siege of a school in Russia’s Beslan by Chechen militants which ended in the death of more than 330 people, half of them children.
The United States, Pakistan‘s ally in its fight against Islamist militants operating in Pakistan andAfghanistan, swiftly condemned the attack.
The Pakistani Taliban have vowed to step up attacks in response to a major army operation against the insurgents in the tribal areas.
But despite the crackdown this year, the military has long been accused of being too lenient towards Islamist militants who critics say are used to carry out the army’s bidding in places like Kashmir and Afghanistan.
The military denies the accusations.
In India, Pakistan‘s long-time rival, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his shock. The Afghan Taliban, which are separate to the Pakistani Taliban, put out a statement condemning the attack as “against the basics of Islam.”
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, joint winner of this year’s Nobel peace prize for education campaign work and survivor of a Taliban attack in 2012, said she was devastated