Militants raided a university in northwest Pakistan, timing their attack to a ceremony at the school to ensure maximum casualties.
As security forces combed the campus block by block after the massacre Wednesday, they counted the bodies of at least 21 students. Four militants were also killed, said army spokesman Lt. Gen. Asim Bajwa.
The attack took place at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, Peshawar — less than 40 kilometers (25 miles) from where the Pakistani Taliban slayed 145 people, including 132 children, in another college attack in December 2014.
It’s unclear whether the group was responsible for the Wednesday incident.
One Pakistani Taliban spokesman, Umar Mansoor, said the attack was in retaliation for military operations against the group. Mansoor was also the mastermind behind the December 2014 attack, Pakistan’s DawnNews reported.
But another spokesman, Mohammad Khurrassani, from the Pakistani Taliban’s central organization, disavowed any role..
We “strongly condemn the attack on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda and disown the attack, saying this is not according to Shariah,” Khurrassani said.
Caught off guard
Wednesday was the 28th anniversary of the university’s founder, Abdul Ghaffar Khan — a 1920s Pashtun independence activist and pacifist also known as Bacha Khan. Guests were gathered at the university to pay tribute to the man when the militants came, said student Zahoor Khan.
Khan said he saw his chemistry professor shot while advising students to stay inside.
A student told DawnNews the attackers were in his own age group.
“The attackers were like us ? they were very young. They carried AK-47 guns. They wore jackets like the forces do.” The student said dozens of students were still asleep in their rooms because they didn’t have class.
“There was firing between attackers and security forces,” the student told DawnNews. “After everything was over, the army men knocked on our room and told us we were safe.”
Troops pour in
In the aftermath, troop transporters pulled up to the gates of the university and drove through onto campus with heavily armed soldiers, video from the scene showed. Other soldiers combed the school’s outer walls with guns held at ready.
Ambulances swarmed to the campus. As rescuers rushed to put people on stretchers, injured people who could stand on their own walked past them in the opposite direction.
Some of them held onto others for support. Some cried openly.
Nearby, groups of men carried caskets through the crowd, and ambulance workers rushed back to their vehicles with the injured on their gurneys.
Prime Minister’s statement
“Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif is deeply grieved over the sad incident of terrorists’ attack on Bacha Khan University, Charsada, which has reportedly resulted into the loss of precious human lives and injured many others,” a statement from the Prime Minister’s office read.
“While condemning the cowardly attack of the terrorists, the Prime Minister said that those killing innocent students and citizens have no faith and religion.”
The past few days have seen an increase in militancy in the region, including an attack on a checkpoint in Khyber Agency, a region west of Peshawar that borders Afghanistan, where 10 people were killed and 36 others injured.