PESHAWAR, Pakistan — “My son was in uniform in the morning. He is in a casket now,” wailed a parent, Tahir Ali, as he came to the hospital to collect the body of his 14-year-old son Abdullah killed on Tuesday as Taliban gunmen stormed a military-run school in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. A Pakistani military spokesman, Asim Bajwa, said 141 people died in the attack — 132 children and nine staff members. He declared the operation over and said the area had been cleared. An additional 121 students and three staff members were wounded. He said seven attackers, all wearing explosives vests, all died in the assault. It was not immediately clear if the militants were all killed by the soldiers or whether they blew themselves up, he said. Witnesses described how a huge blast shook the Army Public School and gunmen went from classroom to classroom, shooting children. The overwhelming majority of the victims were students in grades 1-10. The school educates the children of both officers and non-commissioned soldiers and army wives often teach there. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the assault and rushed to Peshawar to show his support for the victims. Distraught parents thronged the city's Lady Reading Hospital in the wake of the attack, weeping uncontrollably as children's bodies arrived, their school uniforms drenched in blood. Irshadah Bibi, 40, whose 12-year-old son was among the dead, beat her face in grief, throwing herself against an ambulance. “O God, why did you snatch away my son? What is the sin of my child and all these children?” she wept. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack as retaliation for a major military offensive in the region, saying militants had been ordered to shoot older students. The attack began around 10.30 am (0530 GMT) when a group of at least five insurgents, reportedly in military uniforms, entered the school. Around five and a half hours after the attack began, the army's chief spokesman General Asim Bajwa said the attackers had been cleared from all but one of the school's buildings. Five militants had been killed, Bajwa said. One student said soldiers came to rescue them 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.” One of the wounded students, Abdullah Jamal, said that he was with a group of 8th, 9th and 10th graders who were getting first-aid instructions and training with a team of Pakistani army medics when the violence began for real. When the shooting started, Jamal, who was shot in the leg, said nobody 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. Another student, Amir Mateen, said they locked the door from the inside when they heard the shooting but gunmen blasted through the door anyway and began shooting.
