Country observed a day of national mourning Thursday for the 21 people killed when heavily-armed gunmen stormed a university in the troubled north-west, exposing the failings in a national crackdown on extremism. Armed police, some perched on the roofs of buildings, were still deployed Thursday morning at the Bacha Khan university campus in Charsadda, where students were targeted with grenades and automatic weapons, an AFP reporter said.
Security forces remained on alert, with police foiling a bomb attack at a crowded bus station in nearby Peshawar Thursday morning. Wednesday's assault, claimed by a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, bore a chilling resemblance to a December 2014 massacre at a school in nearby Peshawar that triggered a crackdown on militants that had been credited with a palpable improvement in security. Around 1,000 people in a nearby village attended the funeral on Thursday of a university caretaker killed.
"I want to tell the terrorists, they can never win, they will lose, we will win, we the followers of peace and not terrorism," Shah Hussain, father of the caretaker Fakhr-e-Alam, told AFP. One of the wounded students, a geology major, died overnight and his funeral was also being held Thursday. The majority of the dead were buried Wednesday in accordance with Muslim tradition. Seven other survivors were in stable condition and being treated in local hospitals, officials said. Defiant authorities kept schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province open Thursday.
"Militants want them shut down," provincial education minister Arif Khan told AFP. "We wanted to send the message that education will continue." Only Bacha Khan university and its sister university Abdul Wali Khan in the town of Mardan were closed, he said. 'Heroes die young'Flags flew at half-mast on government buildings while a prayer ceremony was set to be held in Islamabad, where Pashtun students were also organising a protest. Pashtuns form the dominant ethnic group in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. More than 200 sportsmen and women gathered along with officials from the Pakistan Sport Board (PSB) at a complex in the capital earlier Thursday to offer prayers for the victims.