At least 25 people were killed and 50 others injured today after heavily armed militants stormed the Bacha Khan University in Pakistan.
The gunmen entered the university in Charsadda, some 50 kilometers from the city of Peshawar, and opened indiscriminate fire on students and teachers.
According to reports, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack. However, their spokesperson Muhammad Khorasani later denied their involvement.
The investigations into the terror attack are underway, but we must not avert our eyes from the fact that the attack was the result of yet another intelligence failure and a major security lapse, especially when only three days ago, rumors of security threats to educational institutions triggered the closure of schools in the same region.
In many ways, today's attack was reminiscent of the gruesome December 2014 terrorist attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar which left over 140 dead - most of them children. The message behind today's attack is the same. 13 months ago, they targeted a school being run by the Pakistan Army that is actively combating terrorists and eliminating their hideouts in North Waziristan. Today, they attacked a university named after Bacha Khan, the man who laid down the foundations of the politics of the secular Awami National Party that has rendered a number of sacrifices for standing up against the Taliban. The message given by the terrorists is loud and clear: standing up to them has a price, and more often than not, you have to pay that with your blood.
More than the identity of the outfit that has claimed the attack on Bacha Khan University, the people of Pakistan in general and those at the helm of affairs in the country in particular need to counter the mindset of the terrorists and the ideology they preach in the name of Islam. These terrorists are afraid of education. They are afraid of the power of knowledge. The very same mindset and the very same group targeted Malala Yousafzai in October 2012, attacked the Army Public School in December 2014 and stormed a university today, apart from deadly attacks on polio vaccination teams across the country.