Snipers killed two more attackers stationed on a rooftop, said Lieutenant General Asim Salim, director general of ISPR, the media department of Pakistan’s military, in a tweet.
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Wednesday’s attack took place about 20 miles outside Peshawar, in the town of Charsadda.
There were also reports of two explosions heard from inside the university.
The university has been cordoned off, said Nasir Durrani, Police Chief of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital.
Taliban leader Khalifa Umar Mansoor made a statement that read, “Our four suicide attackers carried out the attack on Bacha Khan University today”.
Vice Chancellor Fazal Rahim told reporters that the university teaches over 3,000 students and was hosting an additional 600 visitors for the poetry recital.
Four assailants were killed in a shootout with army and police officers.
A school official said that when she and her colleagues realized they were under attack, they locked the door of their office, turned off the lights and lay on the floor.
“We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland”.
Armed militants with reported links to the Taliban stormed a school in turbulent northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 19, despite a nationwide security crackdown.
The university was founded in 2012 and named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a 1920s Pashtun independence activist and pacifist also known as Bacha Khan, who died in 1988.
The death toll has risen to 21 after gunmen stormed a university in northwest Pakistan.
Though the Taliban have been weakened since attacks against their stronghold in northwest Pakistan since 2014, the terror group is still capable of carrying out large scale attacks. Two attacks last week in the southwestern city of Quetta killed 19 people, including soldiers and police.
By afternoon on Wednesday, the military said all four gunmen had been killed.
“I have no idea about what’s going on but I heard one security official talking on the phone to someone and [he] said many people had been killed and injured”, lecturer Shabir Khan told the news agency.
“There were four or five who entered from the right side of the university and they started firing”, university staff member Alamgir Khan recalled.
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The Peshawar region has suffered repeated attacks in recent years. In that incident, a group of Taliban insurgents raided a school for children of military officers, killing 148 people, majority children.
