DEVELOPING STORY:
12:06pm EST
BBC News and CNN are now reporting – An assault led by the Taliban on a Pakistan military-run school Tuesday left 141 people dead, 132 of which were children, officials say, in the worst attack to hit the country in years.
Attackers set on fire at least one teacher — threw petrol on her and lit a match — in front of the schoolchildren #PeshawarAttack
— omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) December 16, 2014
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. Bajwa described an assault that seemed designed purely to terrorize the children rather than take anyone hostage to further the militant group’s aims.
Taliban gunmen stormed an army-run school in Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 126 people, most of them children in one of the country’s bloodiest attacks in recent years, officials said.
Witnesses described how a huge blast shook the Army Public School in the northwestern city of Peshawar and gunmen went from classroom to classroom.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan 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 started at 10 a.m. local time. Mudassir Awan, a worker at the school, said he saw six people scaling the walls of the school.
“We thought it must be the children playing some game,” he told Reuters news agency. “But then we saw a lot of firearms with them.
“As soon as the firing started, we ran to our classrooms,” he said. “They were entering every class and they were killing the children.”
New York Daily News reports:
“They literally set the teacher on fire with gasoline and made the kids watch,” the source said. The Taliban took credit for the horrific attack and said it sent in six gunmen wearing suicide vests on a mission to kill the school’s older students.
RT Reports:
“Seven to eight people attacked us, then an army soldier came to us and he asked [the] principal and teachers to take the children out of compound from the back gate. There were thousands [of] students in college. They were moved to auditorium, they can’t come out until the fight is ended,” Arshad Khan, a student at the school, told RT’s Ruptly.
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