Death toll at university up to 22 after Pakistani Taliban attack

At least 22 people were killed and many more wounded when militants attacked a university campus in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, a police official said.

A leader of the Pakistani Taliban said the group claimed responsibility for the attack, among the most brazen in a long insurgency it has waged targeting educational institutions in particular.

The site of Wednesday’s assault, Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, is just 25 miles from a school in Peshawar where the Pakistani Taliban killed 145 people, most of them children, in 2014.

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People chant slogans and hold signs condemning the militant attack at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, during a protest in Lahore, Pakistan January 20th, 2016. Photograph: Mohsin Raza/Reuters

Two years earlier, the group shot Malala Yousafzai, the teenage activist for girls’ rights later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Pakistani Taliban was weakened recently when the military launched an offensive in its main haven of North Waziristan, but the latest attack and a suicide bombing on Tuesday that killed 11 people underscored the jihadis’ capabilities.

Under a heavy fog Wednesday, gunmen scaled the rear walls of the university around 9am, firing into the air, witnesses said.

Security forces killed the attackers before they could detonate suicide vests, said Saeed Wazir, the Charsadda police chief.

The dead included students, a senior faculty member and four guards, said Fakhr-i-Alam, a senior government official.

At least 19 people were wounded.

Exchanges of fire

A Pakistani military spokesman, Lt Gen Asim Saleem Bajwa, said at least four attackers had been killed in exchanges of fire with security forces.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, condemned the attack. “We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland,” he said in a statement from Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum.

“The countless sacrifices made by our countrymen will not go in vain, inshallah [God willing].”

Raza Mohammed Khan, deputy superintendent of the police in Charsadda, said all four attackers had been killed and that no more militants remained inside the university. “Bomb disposal people are on the spot defusing suicide vests,” Fakhr-i-Alam said. “The operation is over; clearance and search is on.”

Khalifa Umar Mansoor, a Pakistani Taliban leader, called reporters in Peshawar to claim responsibility for the attack and to say that four of their men were involved.

He said the assault was in response for the execution in December of four men convicted of aiding the 2014 Peshawar school attackers.

Salma Khan, an official at Bacha Khan University, said when she and her colleagues realised they were under attack, they locked the door of their office, turned off the lights and lay on the floor. “The university has its own security staff, but it’s not adequate enough to face the well-armed and -trained Taliban,” she said.

‘Such cowardly acts’

Many students were killed in their dormitories, she added. “Our resolve of educating our children cannot be shaken by such cowardly acts.“

Sajjad Ahmed, a professor of sociology and gender studies, said he saw the attackers shoot a dozen students. “I will not forget this terrible scene for rest of my life,” he said. “Students were falling like someone was cutting down newly blossomed flowers.”

Kasib Jan, a student, told ARY TV that he had seen four or five gunmen with black turbans shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”

“They were firing all around,” he said. “University security guards first engaged them, but it was beyond their capacities. We hid behind the benches in the classrooms. We heard them walking around, but they moved away. We came out and ran away to safety.”

He said Wednesday was an exam day and a peace concert had also been scheduled, so the campus was filled with students.

Officials said 2,500 students and staff members were at the school during the attack. Bacha Khan University was founded in 2012 and named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Pashtun activist who advocated nonviolent means to resist British rule in South Asia.

Wednesday was the 28th anniversary of the death of Ghaffar Khan, who was described as “the frontier Gandhi”.

A graduate student at a local hospital being treated for a gunshot wound told ARY TV that he could not see much of the attack because of the fog.

Peshawar and the surrounding region have faced repeated attacks in recent years. The December 2014 attack by seven Pakistani Taliban gunmen on a military-run school in Peshawar was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history and provoked a broad crackdown on militants in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

A Taliban attack on a Pakistani air force base near Peshawar killed 30 people in September. In the assault on Tuesday, a Taliban suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed 11 people at a police checkpoint in Peshawar.

New York Times