Multiple outlets are reporting that a least 20 Pakistanis have been killed, and at least 60 injured, after four gunmen stormed Bacha Khan University in northwest Pakistan during a school ceremony on Wednesday. Law enforcement officers eventually killed the attackers after an hours-long shootout at the public university in Charsbadda, a town located about 13 miles northeast of Peshawar.
According to CNN, there remains some confusion about the shooting’s motive, and whether the gunmen were affiliated with the Taliban, whose members have claimed responsibility for other massacres in northwest Pakistan:
The attack took place at Bacha Khan University [which is] less than 40 kilometers (25 miles) from where the Pakistan Taliban slayed 145 people, including 132 children, in a school attack in December 2014. It’s unclear whether the group was responsible for the Wednesday incident.
One Pakistan Taliban spokesman, Umar Mansoor, said the attack was in retaliation for military operations against the group. Mansoor was also the mastermind behind the December 2014 attack, Pakistan’s DawnNews reported.
But another spokesman, Mohammad Khurrassani, from the Pakistan Taliban’s central organization, disavowed any role. We “strongly condemn the attack on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda and disown the attack, saying this is not according to Shariah,” Khurrassani said.
The attack was timed to take place during an event honoring the university’s namesake, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (whose nickname is Bacha Khan), a colleague of Mohandas Gandhi who advocated for the liberation of the Pashtun people, an ethnic group that has historically occupied the remote borderlands between northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, an area commonly referred to as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In 1986, Khan’s son, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, founded the leftist Awami National Party, whose members oppose Taliban rule and have been frequently targeted in violent attacks by the militant organization.
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