Peshawar : The suicide bombers who had unleashed a bloodbath in a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar Tuesday were told by their handlers to kill securitymen before blowing themselves up.
This was revealed by transcripts of the conversation that the terrorists had with their handlers, which were accessed by the Pakistani authorities and which formed part of an intelligence dossier the Pakistani army chief General Raheel Sharif shared with Afghan authorities Wednesday, according to a Dawn report Thursday.
In one of the worst acts of human savagery ever perpetrated, the Pakistani Taliban slaughtered 148 people, most of them children, in a brazen terror attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar in retaliation to the Pakistani army’s operation Zarb-e-Azb against extremists in North Waziristan.
“We have killed all the children in the (school) auditorium,” one of the attackers told his handler. “What do we do now,” he asked. “Wait for the army people, kill them before blowing yourself (up),” his handler ordered.
This, according to a security official, was one of the last conversations that the attackers had with their handlers shortly before charging towards the special operations soldiers positioned outside the entrance of the school’s administration block.
“Vital elements of intelligence were shared with the authorities concerned with regard to the Peshawar incident,” said an Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) statement on Gen. Sharif’s visit to Afghanistan.
Pakistan has the names of the attackers and the transcripts of the conversation between one of them, identified as Abuzar, and his handler, “commander” Umar.
Umar Adizai, also known as Umar Naray and Umar Khalifa, is a senior militant from the Frontier Region Peshawar.
Security officials believe that he made the calls from the Nazian district of Afghanistan’s Nangrahar province and now want the Afghan authorities to take action.
The attackers entered the building by climbing a rear compound wall, using a ladder and cutting the barbed wire. They all headed for the main auditorium where an instructor was giving a first-aid lesson to the students of the school’s senior section.
“Did the attackers have prior knowledge of the congregation in the main hall? We don’t know this yet. This is one of the questions we are trying to find an answer to,” a security official said.