Five armed paramilitary guards were settling in yesterday to their new posting, a dingy upstairs room overlooking the gateway to St John Vianney Catholic Church in Peshawar, north-west Pakistan.
The Frontier Corps soldiers armed with rifles were billeted within hours of the massacre in a Catholic church some 300 miles away in Bahawalpur.
By mid-morning yesterday, the parish priest of St John Vianney Church hadn't yet had the chance to change out of his night clothes, so busy was he dealing with worried parishioners as well as special branch officers assessing his security needs.
Father Yaqub Shahzad said members of his congregation feared they may be targeted by extremist Muslims. Today he will celebrate Mass at the end of a month-long peace novena. "I will explain the whole situation to the worshippers and try to take out the fear," he said. "I will say it is God's will. Our lives are in his hands. He is our protector."
There is no evidence that Sunday's attack was directly related to the ongoing unrest in Pakistan over the US air strikes in neighbouring Afghanistan. However, the local community in Bahawalpur has blamed pro-Taliban hardliners for the killings of 16 people, including a family of seven.
Peshawar's Christian minority has not been targeted in the past, but many were understandably anxious yesterday.
Ms Ruby Rachel John (23), a student living in the city's largest Catholic district, has been afraid to go to the local bazaar unaccompanied by a man since the US air strikes began.
A former part-time teacher in an all-Afghan school, she stopped attending work immediately after the US attacks started, and subsequently lost her job.
The Youssaf Abad suburban district where she lives among about 400 Catholic families is adjacent to an impoverished sector of single-storey mud and brick houses occupied by settled Afghan refugees. They are predominantly Pashtuns, the same ethnic group which Taliban members belong to.
"The Afghans here think we are Jewish because they are uneducated and can't differentiate between Christians and Pakistanis," she says. "When we go out they say those are the Christians and those people are with the USA, but we are living in Pakistan and we are Pakistanis."
Ruby has not been physically attacked, but says she feels harassed and intimidated by Afghan men who touch her inappropriately at the bazaar.
The attack on the church has heightened her deep sense of insecurity. "We are afraid that they can come to our house, but our boys and men are ready for any problem," she says. "We don't know when the Afghans will come for us and attack us. We don't know their thinkings (sic) or their hearts." Despite her concerns, Ruby says she will continue to attend weekly Mass "because it's our religion and we believe God will be with us. We can't postpone our relations with God."
Sunday's church massacre marked a departure from the usual pattern of religious tension in Pakistan. For many years there has been sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslim sects. However, relatively little violence has been directed at Pakistan's Christians, who comprise only 2 per cent of the country's 140 million people. Greater Peshawar has a population of about 3 million with an estimated 60,000 Christians, who are generally identifiable by their dark complexions. There are five Christian churches in the Peshawar area, two Catholic and three Protestant.
All Saints Protestant Church in the city centre was built to resemble a mosque in 1883 to confound local tribal people who were opposed to Christianity. Only the crucifix perched atop the main turret indicates that it is a Christian temple. When the spire was being erected in the 19th century, 14 workers were killed. A bullet hole in the centre of the cross can still be clearly seen. The church's minister, the Rev Samuel Pervez Asghar, and his wife Sarophina reflected yesterday on the Bahawalpur massacre. While the church attacked was a Catholic one, a Protestant service was being conducted at the time. Mr Asghar's assistant priest is the uncle of a man whose entire family were killed in the attack.
The couple said they were not overly fearful for their safety or that of their congregation, suspecting it was a local attack in an area which has been subjected to sectarian violence in the past.
However, they too have accepted a posting of armed guards in the church's walled courtyard. "Christians feel that the longer the war goes on there might be reprisals," said Ms Asghar. "There might be. You never know where they are going to turn."