A group of four terrorists, using the cover of thick, wintry fog, scaled the walls of the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, about 30 miles from Peshawar, in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
About 3,000 students and 600 guests were present in the campus to commemorate the death anniversary of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a popular ethnic Pashtun independence activist after whom the university is named, when the gunmen entered the campus and opened fire on students and teachers. Police, soldiers and Special Forces swarmed the university from the ground and the air in a bid to shut down the assault.
“Our four suicide attackers carried out the attack on Bacha Khan University today,” Umar Mansoor, a senior commander of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistani (TTP) said this afternoon. But hours later, a written statement by spokesman Muhammad Khorasani denied that.
“We saw three terrorists shouting, ‘Allah is great!’ and rushing towards the stairs of our department,” said a male student to reporters. “One student jumped out of the classroom through the window. We never saw him get up.”
Students spoke of a hero teacher — named by media as Syed Hamid Hussain — fighting back against the intruders, shooting his weapon in a bid to protect his charges. Watch the video to get more details.
