Deadly attack on university in Pakistan

The deadly assault was carried out in Charsadda, north-west Pakistan.
According to reports, the attack has left at least eight people dead.

Four of the attackers were also killed.

Nearly three hours after the attack began, an army official said firing had stopped but troops continued to search the campus, block by block.

A similar incident occurred in 2014, when more than 130 students were killed at a school in Peshawar.

As it is known the attackers struck at around 09:30 local time (04:30 GMT) entering from the back where a university guesthouse is located.

“I personally heard two explosions near hostel number one,” an unidentified eyewitness told Pakistan’s Geo TV.

Then the eyewitness added that it’s not clear whether they were suicide bombers or grenades.
Police and soldiers surrounded the campus and an evacuation got under way.

According to local media the number of death people was higher, about 15-20 people.

An assistant professor at the university, Dr. Shakoor, told the BBC he had turned back from the main gate of the campus after being told it was under attack.

Most of the students and members of the faculty would probably still not have arrived when the attack started, he said.

He saw people coming out through the main gate, apparently because the attackers had entered the campus from the back.

Dr Shakoor said he suspected the attack might have been carried out to honor a Pashtun nationalist leader from the Partition era, Bacha Khan, after whom the university is named.

The nationalists, represented by the ANP party, opposed the Taliban and Islamist resistance to the Soviets in neighbouring Afghanistan back in the 1980s, the BBC’s IIyas Khan says. As such, an attack on the university holds symbolic value for Islamists, the BBC correspondent reports.