A man comforts his son, who was injured during an attack by Taliban gunmen on the Army Public School, at Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, December 16: Reuters photo
As parents of 132 children killed in the Peshawar school massacre prepared to bury them on Wednesday morning, a father remembered that around the same time on Tuesday, his child had pleaded with him to be allowed to skip school.
"It was god's will. He did not want to go to school as he had a headache. Who would have known then that I would spend the rest of the day searching for his body?" said the man, holding his head in grief.
In an eight-hour rampage at the Army Public School and Degree College, nine Taliban gunmen went from room to room, firing indiscriminately and throwing grenades.
"They went in uniform, came back in a coffin," said one parent.
The school's motto was visible on the blood-splattered uniforms: "I shall rise and shine."
Some of the 1,100 students at the school were lined up and slaughtered with shots to the head. Almost the entire ninth grade of the school has been wiped out, said one tweet.
A spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban told the media yesterday that the gunmen were ordered only to shoot older students.
A 14-year-old boy's bullet-riddled body told the story of the brutality of the killings. Taiyyab had been shot nine times. His father found his body at 1 am late on Tuesday night.
"There is a
janaza (funeral procession) in every street," said a man walking in one of the many processions in the city today.
Around this time yesterday, the parents had prepared their children for school. This morning, many of them set out to bury their bodies, their grief shared by the world.