“We have killed all the children in the auditorium,” one of the attackers told his handler. “What do we do now?”
The handler replied: “Wait for the army people, kill them before blowing yourself.”
The conversation was one of the last between the seven attackers and their Taliban boss, according to security officials.
Shortly after, two of the suicide attackers charged special forces soldiers arriving at the Peshawar Army Public School.
Five other attackers blew themselves up inside the school.
The authorities said that Gen Raheel Sharif, army chief of staff, had shared a large intelligence dossier with the authorities in neighbouring Afghanistan, and that transcripts of conversations between an attacker called “Abuzar” and his commander “Umar” over the seven hours of the assault were among them.
“Umar” is believed to be Umar Mansoor Darra, alias Umar Khalifa Adenzai, a senior lieutenant of the Pakistani Taliban leader Mullah Maulana Fazlullah.
He is thought to have made the phone calls from the Nazian district of Nangarhar on the Afghan side of the border.
More than 100 of the deaths in the attack were in the school auditorium, where several classes of senior boys were having a joint first aid class.
Many of the survivors described the attackers going through the auditorium, pulling boys from under desks where they were hiding and shooting them.
Others ran into militants who were blocking the doors.
“Did the attackers have prior knowledge of the congregation in the main hall?” a security official was quoted as saying by Dawn newspaper. “ don’t know this yet. This is one of the questions we are trying to find an answer to.”
At least two of the children killed in the attack were beheaded, according to medical staff.
“One 13-year-old boy came in without his head. It was missing,” said a senior doctor who was among staff who received the dead and injured at the Lady Reading Hospital.
He said his throat appeared to have been cut with a sharp knife. Another health worker, Anwar Ali, said a second boy from grade six also had his head missing.
“He has received multiple bullet injuries in his whole body,” Mr Ali said. “His head was missing. It seems that he was beheaded by the militants.”
The first boy was identified by his parents from pre-existing marks on his body.
The intelligence dossier was handed by Gen Sharif to the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani. The fight against the Taliban on both sides of the border has been hampered for years by distrust between the two neighbours.
Source: ibnlive.in.com
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