A student being evacuated to an ambulance after an attack by Taliban militants on a school which left 132 children and nine adults dead in Peshawar, Pakistan yesterday.
Militants from the Pakistani Taliban have attacked a school in Peshawar, killing 141 people, 132 of them children, the military say.
Pakistani officials say the attack is now over, with all of the attackers killed. A total of seven militants took part, according to the army.
Scores of survivors are being treated in hospitals as frantic parents search for news of their children.
The attack is the deadliest ever by the Taliban in Pakistan.
There has been chaos outside hospital units to which casualties were taken, the BBC’s Shaimaa Khalil reports from Peshawar.
Bodies have been carried out of hospitals in coffins, escorted by crowds of mourners, some of them visibly distraught.
A Taliban spokesman told BBC Urdu that the school, which is run by the army, had been targeted in response to army operations.
Hundreds of Taliban fighters are thought to have died in a recent military offensive in North Waziristan and the nearby Khyber area.
US President Barack Obama condemned the “horrific attack (...) in the strongest possible terms”.
Military spokesman Asim Bajwa told reporters in Peshawar that 132 children and nine members of staff had been killed.
All seven of the attackers wore suicide bomb vests, he said. Scores of people were also injured.
It appears the militants scaled walls to get into the school and set off a bomb at the start of the assault.
Children who escaped say the militants then went from one classroom to another, shooting indiscriminately.
One boy told reporters he had been with a group of 10 friends who tried to run away and hide. He was the only one to survive.
Others described seeing pupils lying dead in the corridors. One local woman said her friend’s daughter had escaped because her clothing was covered in blood from those around her and she had lain pretending to be dead.
A hospital doctor treating injured children said many had head and chest injuries.
Irshadah Bibi, a woman who lost her 12-year-old son, was seen beating her face in grief, throwing herself against an ambulance.
“O God, why did you snatch away my son?” AFP news agency quoted her as saying.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the attack and said he was on his way to Peshawar.
“I can’t stay back in Islamabad. This is a national tragedy unleashed by savages. These were my kids,” he said in a statement.
Many of the students were the children of military personnel. Most of them would have been aged 16 or under.
Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani Nobel laureate who was shot by the Taliban for campaigning for the right to an education, condemned the attack.