As distraught parents watched, more students were still being held hostage inside the school for grades 1 through 10 in the northwest part of the country, provincial minister Inayatullah Khan told local television. Explosions and gunfire were heard from the school hours after Taliban attackers first entered, according to the Washington Post.
"My son was in uniform in the morning. He is in a casket now," wailed one parent, Tahir Ali, as he came to the hospital to collect the body of his 14-year-old son Abdullah. "My son was my dream. My dream has been killed."
Most of the dead were between 12 to 16 years old, said the chief minister of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pervez Khattak.
"We were in the examination hall when all of sudden firing started and our teachers told us to silently lay on the floor," one student inside the school at the time of the attack told a private television channel. "We remained on the floor for an hour. There was a lot of gunfire. When the gunfire died down our soldiers came and guided us out."
“I saw six or seven people walking class-to-class and opening fire on children,” Mudassar Abbas, a lab assistant at the school, told The Express Tribune.
Traumatized children who were lucky enough to escape alive recalled the bloodshed. "While we were being moved out, we saw bodies of our classmates lying in the corridors," one student told DawnNews.
"All the children had bullet wounds. All the children were bleeding," another wounded student, Abdullah Jamal, told the Associated Press from his hospital bed.
In all, about 500 pupils and teachers were believed to be inside the Army Public School and Degree College when uniformed militants stormed the building Tuesday morning, according to Reuters. Most of the students were civilians, the AP reported.
Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to media, saying that six suicide bombers had carried out the attack as revenge for the killings of Taliban members at the hands of Pakistani authorities. But the chief minister said there were eight attackers, dressed in military uniforms. Two were killed by security forces and one blew himself up, Khattak said. The rest were still fighting.
"We selected the army's school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females," Khorasani said, according to Reuters. "We want them to feel the pain."
Khorasani said that the attackers had been ordered to shoot the older students but not the young children.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif headed to Peshawar after getting word of the attack, according to the Times of India. "I have decided to proceed to Peshawar and I will supervise the operation my self," he said. "These are my children and it is my loss."
Sharif announced that three days of national mourning would be observed in the wake of the attack.
Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for promoting girls' education, said in a statement that she was "heartbroken" by the violence. "Innocent children in their school have no place in horror such as this," she said. "I condemn these atrocious and cowardly acts and stand united with the government and armed forces of Pakistan whose efforts so far to address this horrific event are commendable. I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brothers and sisters -- but we will never be defeated."
