Militants kill 20 in assault on Pakistani university

Wednesday was the 28th anniversary of the university’s founder, Abdul Ghaffar Khan – a 1920s Pashtun independence activist and pacifist also known as Bacha Khan.

Syed Hamid Hussain fought bravely to protect students from the gunfire during the violent attack on Bacha Khan University in Pakistan.

Militants raided a university in northwest Pakistan, timing their attack to a ceremony at the school to ensure maximum casualties.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a call to The Associated Press Wednesday.

According to a report from the Daily Pakistan, one of the victims was identified as a chemistry professor. Guests were gathered at the university to pay tribute to the man when the militants came, said student Zahoor Khan.

Condemning the vicious assault, the premier said that those involved in killing innocent people have no faith or religion.

Soldiers were rushed in from the provincial capital, Peshawar, to help police clear the campus while anxious relatives waited for news outside the gates.

The attackers carried mobile phones with Afghan numbers and “were in touch with their handlers in Afghanistan”, said Pakistan military spokesman Lt. Gen Asim Bajwa.

“More than 30 others including students, staff and security guards were wounded”, he added.

The backlash that followed the Peshawar attack was so severe that it probably left the Taliban “reluctant to take credit, he added, noting that Afghan security forces joined in operations against Pakistani Taliban hideouts afterward”.

The army said that operation has been completed and all the terrorists were killed by the security forces.

However, a spokesman for the main Taliban faction in Pakistan later disowned the group behind Wednesday’s attack, describing the assault as “un-Islamic”.

Speaking after today’s attack, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said: “We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland”.

“The death toll in the terrorist attack has risen to 21”, regional police chief Saeed Wazir told AFP hours after the alarm was first raised.

The attack began shortly after classes started at the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, a town 35 kilometers (21 miles) outside Peshawar, said Deputy Commissioner Tahir Zafar. Hospital official Sher Akbar Khan says the hospital has received 19 bodies so far. The attackers were later contained inside two university blocks where the troops killed four attackers, the army said. Mohammad Khurasani also denied earlier reports that he had endorsed Mansoor’s claim and said that those who carried out such attacks would be tried before an Islamic, or Sharia court. The faction’s leader, Omar Mansoor, was the mastermind of the December 2014 Peshawar school attack.