Pakistani university under attack

PM Sharif has vowed a “ruthless” response to the massacre and ordered security forces to hunt those behind Wednesday s attack on the Bacha Khan university in Charsadda, where students were targeted with grenades and automatic weapons.

As police and soldiers rushed to the campus, the attackers traded gunfire with the troops and several explosions were heard from the area of the university.

Several sources said that a professor in the chemistry department was shot dead.

A breakaway Taliban faction led by Khalifa Umar Mansoor said it had carried out the attack.

Five injured people have so far been evacuated from the campus, the report states, but none of the 3,000 students and 600 guests on the university campus have been injured, according to Pakistani media, citing an audio message released by Fazal Rahim Marwat, vice-chancellor of Bacha Khan University.

Peshawar was the location of Pakistan’s deadliest ever extremist attack, when Taliban gunmen stormed an army-run school in December a year ago and slaughtered more than 150 people, a lot of them children, in an hours-long siege.

“We offer our deepest condolences to the victims of the attacks and to their families, and we stand with the people of the region against all forms of extremism and terrorism”, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.

Khyam Mashal, a student at the university, was in the boys’ hostel on the campus, where he lives, when the militants attacked.

Expressing similar sentiments, Defence Expert PK Sehgal said the Taliban which is taking revenge on the Pakistan Army is making desperate attempts to overthrow the government in Islamabad.

He was sleeping when a friend woke him to tell him that terrorists were attacking the school.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was quoted on the website of the “Daily Pakistan” as saying: “We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland”.

Former Pakistan cricket captain and chairman of the Tehreek-e-Insaf political party Imran Khan condemned the attack as well.

“We are not safe, even parents do not feel safe”, he said.

Only Bacha Khan university and its sister university Abdul Wali Khan in the town of Mardan were closed, he said.