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At
least 130 people, most of them students as young as 12, have been killed and at
least 122 others injured in a Taliban seizure of a military-run school in the
city of Peshawar, Pakistan, according to provincial authorities.
RT.com reports the numbers of dead and injured may still
rise as the casualties of the assault are counted.
Some
500 students and teachers were in the Army Public School on Warsak Road at the
time of the attack. Pakistan’s military said most of the civilians escaped, but
some had been taken hostage by the assailants.
According
to media reports, as many as 10 militants dressed in Pakistani military
uniforms entered the school compound on Tuesday at around noon. They torched a
car at the site and proceeded with a raid on the facility.
“Seven
to eight people attacked us, then an army soldier came to us and he asked [the]
principal and teachers to take the children out of compound from the back gate.
There were thousands [of] students in college. They were moved to auditorium,
they can’t come out until the fight is ended,”
Arshad Khan, a student at the school, told RT's Ruptly.
The
Pakistani Army responded to the emergency, dispatching security forces to
cordon off the area and sending military helicopters for surveillance. A
commando force arrived at the site.
“As the firing started our teacher asked
us to bent down and we went to a corner of the class, after one hour when
firing reduced, [an] army officer came and rescued us, but as we came out we
saw on the way in corridors our friends were lying dead on ground hit by
bullets, some with three, some with four bullets. They were bleeding,”
another student, Muhammad Naeem, said.
In the ensuing battle with Pakistani
security forces, six militants were killed, according to the military. One of
them is said to have detonated a suicide vest he was wearing, according to
local media.
At
least one Pakistani soldier was reported killed in the gun battle, which
seriously damaged the school building.
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The
military said their progress in clearing the school was being hampered by booby
trap explosives left behind by the attackers.
As
clashes inside the school continued, some of the hostages were still believed
to be held by the militants, Inayatullah Khan, the provincial minister for
local government, said, citing the military.
In
the latest development a series of three explosions have been heard inside the
school, Reuters reported.
Pakistani
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called the attack on the school a national tragedy
and said he would personally supervise the army operation in Peshawar.
"I can't stay back in Islamabad. This
is a national tragedy unleashed by savages. These were my kids,"
he said in a statement.
The
provincial government declared three days of mourning over the tragedy.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the
attack, but claimed it was not targeting the pupils.
"Our
suicide bombers have entered the school, they have instructions not to harm the
children, but to target army personnel,"
Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani told Reuters.
The
militants, however, see older students at the school as legitimate targets for
their attack.
The Taliban said it staged the attack in retaliation for the Pakistani Army’s
ongoing operations in the North Waziristan tribal area. It said it had targeted
the school because “because the government is targeting our families and
females” in the military operations.
"We
want them to feel the pain," Khorasani said.
The
school assault in Pakistan is a seemingly new tactic for the Taliban, which has
tended to attack security checkpoints, police stations, security troops and
other targets of military value. Its strategy has been to avoid civilian
casualties to some extent, since it finds recruits, financial support and
informants among the population caught in its war with the Pakistani
government.
However,
the Taliban has attacked girls’ schools, which the group deem un-Islamic, and
has targeted political activists, such as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner
Malala Yousafzai.
But
the tactic of indiscriminately killing children is painfully familiar in
Russia, which experienced one of its worst hostage crises in September 2004,
when a group of terrorists seized a school in the North Caucasus town of
Beslan.
The
siege of the school, where 32 militants held over 1,100 people at gunpoint,
including 777 children, lasted for three days. With tension alarmingly high on
the third day of the stand-off, several blasts inside the school triggered a
chaotic chain of events.
Russian security forces and
local militia made a desperate attempt to storm the building and save the
hostages in apparent danger of being slaughtered. The militants opened fire as
hostages tried to run for their lives. The long siege and gunbattle claimed the
lives of more than 330 hostages, including 186 children.
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