Peshawar: One remembered the door to his classroom being kicked open by two gunmen who then opened fire without warning. Another recalled a gunman asking his group to recite verses from the Quran before gunning down his friends.
But the images that 16-year-old Shahrukh Khan replayed from a hospital bed in Peshawar told the full story of the terror and brutality that unfolded at the army school.
Talking to an AFP correspondent, Khan recalled seeing “big black boots” coming towards him before he was shot in both legs. Then, he woke up and crawled to the next room to witness this sight: “I saw the dead body of our office assistant on fire. She was sitting on the chair with blood dripping from her body as she burned.”
The teenager and his classmates were attending a careers guidance session in the school auditorium when four gunmen wearing paramilitary uniforms entered.
“Someone screamed at us to get down and hide below the desks,” Khan said. The gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire —- “one of them shouted: ‘There are so many children beneath the benches, go and get them’,” the boy told AFP.
Khan said he felt intense pain as he was shot in both his legs just below the knee but decided to play dead, saying, “I folded my tie and pushed it into my mouth so that I wouldn’t scream.
“The man with big boots kept on looking for students and pumping bullets into their bodies. I lay as still as I could and closed my eyes, waiting to get shot again.
“My body was shivering. I saw death so close and I will never forget the black boots approaching me. I felt as though it was death that was approaching me.”
Some of the gunmen also asked students to recite from the Quran before gunning them down, the Express Tribune reported.
“I was sitting in the corridor with 10 of my classmates when we heard firing,” the report quoted Aamir Ali, a second-year engineering student, as saying. “We immediately ran towards the classroom to hide but the militants chased us down and found us. They were dressed in shalwar kameez and the only thing they told us was: ‘Read the kalima’.”
Ali said he was the only one to survive in the group of 10.
Kashan, a ninth grader who was injured in the attack, told an Express Tribune correspondent: “We were sitting in the hall and a colonel was giving a lecture when we heard firing from the back.”
The report quoted him as saying, “The sound of the firing kept moving closer when suddenly the door behind us was kicked down and two people started firing indiscriminately.”
The last thing he remembered was children and people falling to the ground.
Khalid Khan, 13, told Reuters that he and his classmates were in a first aid lesson in the main hall when two clean-shaven armed men wearing white clothes and black jackets entered the room.
“They opened fire at the students and then went out. The army doctor and soldiers managed to escape and we locked the doors from inside,” he said. “But very soon they came, broke the doors and entered and again started firing.”
He said many tried to hide under their desks but were shot anyway, adding that there were around 150 students in the hall around the time of the attack.
“They killed most of my classmates and then I didn’t know what happened as I was brought to the hospital,” said Khan, breaking down in sobs.
Others said the gunmen addressed each other in a language they could only recognise as either Arabic or Farsi – a possible testament to the Taliban’s network of hundreds of foreign fighters holed up with them in the remote mountains on the Pakistani-Afghan border.
Another student, Jalal Ahmed, 15, could hardly speak, choking with tears, as Reuters approached him at one of the hospitals.
“I am a biochemistry student and I was attending a lecture in our main hall. There are five doors in the hall. After some time we heard someone kicking the back doors. There were gun shots but our teacher told us to be quiet and calmed us down.
“Then the men came with big guns.”
