Sharif Appreciates Sentiment Expressed by PM Modi on University Attack

In the aftermath of the attack, Vice-Chancellor Fazle-ur-Rahim Marwat said security forces alone could not protect the school.

It was one of the most brazen attacks claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, and came barely one year after the militant group raided an army-run public school in Peshawar, massacring more than 150 people, majority children.

Mansoor, who masterminded the Peshawar school attack, said a four-man Taliban team carried out the latest assault.

Witnesses said the teacher, chemistry professor Dr Syed Hamid Husain, attempted to shoot back at the militants.

One turning point was the Taliban attempt on the life of the schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012, transforming her into a global icon of courage and energizing other education campaigners in Pakistan.

Armed police, some perched on the roofs of buildings, were still deployed Thursday morning at the Bacha Khan university campus in Charsadda, where students were targeted with grenades and automatic weapons, an AFP reporter said.

Together the initiatives are credited with making 2015 the least deadly in terms of militant attacks since the formation of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistani (TTP) in 2007.

Students said the attackers opened fire indiscriminately.

“Strongly condemn the terror attack at Bacha Khan University in Pakistan”.

“It is premature to draw any conclusion as to who may be behind the Charsada University attack before investigations are complete”, Foreign Office spokesperson Qazi Khalilullah said here. It said four attackers were sent to the university. “Youth who are studying in non-military institutions, we consider them as builders of the future nation and we consider their safety and protection our duty”, the statement said.

A group of militants stormed a university in volatile northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday using the cover of thick fog, police said, with firing inside the campus still going on and two explosions heard.

The massacre in Charsadda, about 30 miles from where the December 2014 school attack occurred in Peshawar, is intensifying fears that Pakistan’s long-term strategy for combating Islamist militant groups is inadequate. The attack coincided with the anniversary of Khan’s death in 1988.

He said it was in revenge for the scores of militants who have been killed by Pakistani security forces in recent months.

The killing of young people “brings a lot of pain, despondency and hopelessness, and that arouses emotions against the government, the same government which claimed it had broken the back of the terrorists”, he said.

In the aftermath, troop transporters pulled up to the gates of the university and entered campus with heavily armed soldiers, video from the scene showed.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in a statement that the government was “determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland”.

Soon after the attack, a large contingent of security forces rushed to the site and started evacuating students.