Pakistan responds to Peshawar school massacre with strikes on Taliban

Jon Boone in Peshawar and Ewen MacAskill

At least 141 dead – including 132 children – after attackers storm school, shoot students and fight with commandos

The Pakistan military has launched massive air strikes in its remote border region against the Taliban in retaliation for the massacre in a Peshawar school on Tuesday morning that left at least 141 dead, 132 of them children.

The attack in Peshawar was one of the most horrific incidents in the country’s troubled history of the last decade, prompting an outcry at home and abroad – mainly because so many children were killed.

The assault began on Tuesday morning when seven attackers dressed in army uniform and wearing suicide vests stormed the school, which is attended almost exclusively by the children of army personnel.

Witnesses described the attackers shooting students at random and taking others hostage. Firefights with Pakistan commandos continued for four to five hours before the school was cleared and the last of the attackers killed. Pakistan’s major general, Asim Salim, said 960 students and staff were rescued.

The Pakistan Taliban, Tehreek-e-Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in revenge for a ferocious army offensive – named Zarb-e-Azb - that has been underway in tribal areas since June.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. “We want them to feel the pain.”

Pakistan’s army chief of staff, General Raheel Shariff, said in a tweet that “massive air strikes” had been carried out in the Khyber region as the school was being cleared of attackers.

Before leaving the capital of Islamabad for Peshawar, which is close to the Afghanistan border and has long had a reputation for lawlessness and terrorist incidents, Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, described the massacre as “a national tragedy”.

He added: “The government together with the army has started Zarb-e-Azb and it will continue until the terrorism is rooted out from our land.”

Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, formerly the North-West Frontier, have seen many terrorist incidents, often occurring out of sight of the media.

But the Peshawar massacre has seen regional rivals join to express sympathy and support for the victims. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, described the attack as cowardly, adding: “It is a senseless act of unspeakable brutality that has claimed lives of the most innocent of human beings – young children in their school.”

The president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, who is engaged in a struggle with the Afghanistan Taliban, also condemned the massacre, saying “the killing of innocent children is contrary to Islam”.

The Nobel Peace prize-winner, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban two years ago for speaking out in favour of education for girls, said the Peshawar attack had left her heartbroken.

“Innocent children in their school have no place in horror such as this.”

Hundreds of students were in the school when the attack began mid-morning, between 10 and 11am local time. Salim said the attacks used a ladder to cross the school walls from a graveyard behind the school.

Ali Khan, a local police official, said: “One of them blew himself up as soon as the guards came to capture them. The others started moving towards classes and the principal’s room.

“This is an upper middle-class area and most of the children belong to army families.”

A student who was in the school at the time of the attack told local media: “The gunmen entered class by class and shot some kids one by one.”

Commandos arrived at the scene soon after the shooting began. Military helicopter gunships hovered above but were unable to open fire for fear of hitting the hostages.

Fighting continued for more than five hours after the attack began. Police were struggling to hold back distraught parents trying to break through a cordon to reach the school when there were three loud explosions after 3.30pm.

A police official in Peshawar told the Guardian that 104 children had been killed and 100 injured. “Some of the injured are critical so the death toll could rise,” he said. Later, Salim, the Pakistani general, said that 141 had died – 132 children and nine members of staff.

Dr Abdul Wahab, head of the emergency department at Lady Reading hospital, which made an appeal for blood, said 26 bodies had been brought in, most of them children, and about 100 injured, again mostly children, wounded by bullets or shrapnel.

Wounded student Abdullah Jamal told the Associated Press he was getting first-aid instructions and training with a team of Pakistani army medics when the attack began.

Jamal, who was shot in the leg, said no one knew what was going on in the first few seconds. “Then I saw children falling down who were crying and screaming. I also fell down. I learned later that I have got a bullet,” he said, speaking from his hospital bed.

Waqar-Ullah Khattack, one of four invigilators at an exam for 61 students aged 14-16 in the school, said he and his colleagues told the students to get down on the floor as soon as they heard firing from an AK-47 and blasts from grenades.

Given the number of terror attacks in the city, he said they had been trained for such an eventuality. Less than an hour after hitting the floor, they were led to safety by commandos, walking past the bodies of at least seven children.

“I have no words for this type of terrorism because we are all just too mentally upset,” Khattack said.

Mudassar Abbas, a physics laboratory assistant at the school, said some students were having a celebration party when the attack began.

“I saw six or seven people walking class to class and opening fire on children,” he said.

A student who survived the attack said soldiers came to rescue students during a lull in the firing.

“When we were coming out of the class we saw dead bodies of our friends lying in the corridors. They were bleeding. Some were shot three times, some four times,” the student said.

“The men entered the rooms one by one and started indiscriminate firing at the staff and students.”

Tehreek-e-Taliban is allied to the Afghanistan Taliban, sharing similar aims regarding the establishment of sharia law and opposition to the US but, unlike the Afghanistan Taliban, regards the Pakistan government as a target.

The Pakistan army has been carrying out a major offensive in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, home to Tehreek-e-Taliban, since June, after an attack on the international airport in Karachi. Hundreds have been killed in the FATA and tens of thousands displaced.