Children massacred in Pakistan school attack

At least 142 people, including 132 children, have been killed in an attack by Pakistani Taliban fighters (TTP) on a military-run school in Peshawar in Pakistan's northwest. Explosions and gunfire rang out as seven armed men attacked the Army Public School on Tuesday morning, in one the bloodiest attacks in Pakistan's history. Ten staff members were also killed. Officials told Al Jazeera that all seven attackers were killed in the operation. Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Peshawar, said  "most of the younger pupils escaped the school, but the senior students were not so lucky". The deadly attack triggered shock and outrage across the world. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said it was a "national tragedy", calling those killed "my children". Shell-shocked survivors described the attack as nothing short of mayhem. The attackers came dressed in paramilitary uniforms looking for people to kill. One survivor, Shahrukh Khan, 16, shot in both legs, said he managed to survive after playing dead. "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," Khan said from the trauma ward at the Lady Reading hospital in Peshawar. Muhammad Khorasani, TTP spokesperson, told Al Jazeera  the suicide bombers had been given orders to allow the youngest students to leave but to kill the rest. The attack was in retaliation for an ongoing Pakistan Army operation against the TTP and its allies in the North Waziristan tribal area, Khorasani said. The TTP said many of their family members had been killed in the campaign, and said the attack on the school was in revenge for those deaths. "Many TTP members have lost their family members and they have said they want to inflict pain," Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder said. "But many ordinary people put their children in military schools because of the relatively higher standard of education, so normal people have been hit as well by this." Major General Asim Saleem Bajwa said all the attackers wore suicide vests and carried rations to last for days. He said the gunmen fired indiscriminately, however, and it did not seem they were planning to take hostages.   Al Jazeera