Pakistan attack: ‘Boys’ hostel the target’ in Bacha Khan University strike

Taliban leader Khalifa Umar Mansoor reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to the AP.

The attack, which also wounded 22 students, raised grim echoes of the 2014 school massacre in the nearby city of Peshawar that left 150 dead, 144 of them children. AP’s earlier story is below.

Taleban militants stormed a university in volatile northwestern Pakistan, yesterday killing at least 21 people and wounding dozens.

The quartet of university attackers were killed as Pakistani soldiers and police flooded the campus Wednesday morning.

The assault began about 9 a.m. when at least four gunmen cut through a back fence into Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, about 30 miles from Peshawar.

The university has over 3,000 enrolled students and was hosting an additional 600 visitors on Wednesday for a poetry recital on the death anniversary of the Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar “Bacha” Khan, the university’s vice-chancellor said.

Expressing solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack at Bacha Khan University in Pakistan, which claimed 21 innocent lives, a group of students from universities across Delhi held a silent candle march at Jantar Mantar here today.

The local police chief reported that the attackers were wearing suicide vests and surviving students said the gunmen were using AK-47s.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed a “ruthless response”, saying the attack was on all of Pakistan.

Bajwa said “major breakthroughs” had been made in identifying the terrorists who attacked the university.

Ban said the right to education for all must be firmly protected and reaffirmed that attacks against students, teachers or schools can never be justified.

Four of the gunmen have been killed by security forces and the army has contained the militants to two blocks inside the university, a spokesman for the army said on twitter.

One of his students, Habibullah, said he rushed to the roof his dormitory to hide from the militants.

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

There are fears that the attackers are holding hostages within the campus grounds.

Officials say they have knowledge of the faces and fingerprints of the attackers.

“We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland”, he said in a statement.

This same splinter group is believed to have been responsible for another attack on a school in the same region of northwest Pakistan in 2014.