Pakistan buries 132 pupils killed by Taliban

Pakistan has organised a colourful but solemn mass burial for the 132 students killed on Tuesday in a grisly attack by the Taliban at Army Public School in Peshawar.

Nine other members of staff were killed in the attack, during which gunmen shot indiscriminately and seven suicide bombers detonated explosives, as reprisal for killings of Taliban members by the Pakistani military.

Mass funerals and prayer vigils were observed for the victims, while some schools closed down in their honour. The schools that opened began the day with special prayers.

According to BBC, new images from the school show the brutality of the attack, with pools of blood on the ground and walls covered in pockmarks from hundreds of bullets.

Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan prime minister, declared three days of mourning and announced an end to the moratorium on the death penalty for terrorists.

He also convened a meeting of all parliamentary parties in Peshawar to discuss a coordinated response to the attack.

“It is a very eerie atmosphere,” BBC’s Mishal Husain wrote of the mood at the school on Wednesday.

“These are premises that should be alive at a time of day like this to the sound of hundreds of children who studied here and began school as normal yesterday. But it is desolate today.

“The army has been working through the night to clear the premises of explosives.

“I am standing now at the bottom of the white stone steps that lead up to the auditorium. There are blood stains running right down the steps and towards the auditorium itself.

“There is a child’s shoe on one of the steps. The auditorium, where children were taking exams, was one of the places within the school grounds that the militants first targeted.

“As I peer in now, the chairs that the children were sitting on are upturned, the place has been turned upside down and again I can see the blood stains on the floor right around me.”

Raheel Sharif, a general and Pakistan’s army chief, arrived in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Wednesday to discuss security cooperation aimed at tackling the Taliban insurgency.

“This is not a human act,” Asim Bajwa, a general and spokesman of the military, told Associated Press during a tour of the school. “This is a national tragedy.”

Aside the dead, 125 people were wounded in the attack, which teaches boys and girls from both military and civilian backgrounds. All seven attackers were killed, while hundreds of people were evacuated.

The attack was one of the heaviest ever by the group, the most recent high-scale attack being the September 22, 2013 raid on a church in the same city, which resulted in the death of at least 80 people.

Tuesday’s attack mirrored the raids in Nigeria’s northeast by Boko Haram, which is opposed to western education.

In February 2013, Boko Haram members attacked a government school in Buni Yadi, Yobe state, in the dead of the night, shooting to death 59 boys who were in their sleep.

A similar attack last month, again at a school in Yobe (Government Comprehensive Science Secondary School, Potiskum) left 47 pupils dead and 79 injured.