Probe terror attack — Pak judge:

Subcontinent

Pakistan’s top judge has ordered the first official investigation into the country’s deadliest terror attack, a massacre at a school that killed more than 150 people in 2014, authorities said on Thursday.

Relatives of the victims mainly children have long called for an accounting of the security and intelligence failures that allowed Pakistani Taliban gunmen to storm the school, run by the powerful military, in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Dec 16, that year.

No government or military official has ever been held to account for the security failings. Criticism of Pakistan’s powerful armed forces, especially their counter insurgency operations, is largely seen as a red line in the country.

Supreme Court chief justice Mian Saqib Nisar ordered the formation of a judicial commission to examine the attack during a court hearing in Peshawar on Wednesday, Abdul Latif Yousafzai, advocate general of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told AFP.

The inquiry was set to be completed in two months, he added.

No official explanation of the timing was

given. But the announcement comes after the newly formed Pashtun Protection Movement (PTM) civil rights group has made the issue a central demand in recent months, putting renewed pressure on the government. (AFP)