Pakistani authorities evacuated a girls’ school Friday when hundreds of terrified parents rushed to save their daughters after rumours of an attack, highlighting frayed nerves days after gunmen stormed a university killing 21 people.
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The attack comes just weeks after Pakistan marked the first anniversary of the December 2014 Taliban massacre at a school in Peshawar.
It was the deadliest militant attack in Pakistan’s history.
Mansoor said Pakistan’s educational institutions provide the future workforce for the military and the government – all of which work against the “will of God”.
Flanked by armed extremists wearing masks, he said that instead of targeting professional soldiers, “we will target the nurseries that produce these people”.
Teachers and lecturers in northwestern Pakistan have been allowed to carry weapons since the Peshawar school attack. The statement further added “The recent remarks by Head of the Inter Services Public Relations Gen Asim Bajwa suggesting that the group of terrorists launched attack on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, are baseless”.
The Bacha Khan attack, which Amnesty International said could be branded a war crime, earned global condemnation including from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and neighbouring India. The attackers were killed before they could explode their suicide vests, officials said. The Pakistani community there condemned the attack in strong terms and paryed for the departed. Our children are also still going to school, colleges and universities with enthusiasm.
An injured university employee, Muhammad Fayyaz, expired this morning in the Neurosurgery Intensive Care Unit at Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital ─ where two others wounded in the attack remain in critical condition.
“He would always help the students and he was the one who knew all their secrets because they would share all their problems with him”, 22-year-old geology student Waqar Ali said.
The Charsadda university is named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a celebrated pre-independence leader known as “the frontier Gandhi” for advocating nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule.
It yet again raised questions about whether security forces are able to protect the country’s educational institutions from extremists.
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Flags on official buildings and parliament are flying at half-mast and police have stepped up security at schools and educational centres across the country. They have a dual mission: “first to vitiate the minds of the Pakhtoons from the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan against the Afghans because Afghanistan is supporting the cause of an independent Pakhtoonistan”, she said.
