Peshawar’s Army Public School, the site of a massacre that killed 149 people almost a month ago, has reopened amid tight security in the capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Helicopters flew overhead early on Monday morning while dozens of army soldiers patrolled the streets around the school, tightly screening entry and exit points to the school compound. Grim-faced
soldiers stood guard as hundreds of children and their parents streamed into the school, where a memorial service was held in the presence of the country’s army chief, General Raheel Sharif. The mood among the students was sombre but defiant as they entered the premises. Many of the children were brought to the school in army lorries, which doubled up as school buses on this, the first day of school in the new year.
Access to the school was tightly controlled, with army soldiers standing guard on several pickets and machine gun nests established in the streets around the school, and as well as the graveyard immediately adjacent to it. In the days since the attack, the school’s walls have been refortified, with spools of razor wire wound around the perimeter. A second perimeter wall, about 50m from the main entrance, has also been erected, in addition to new CCTV systems.
Particular attention was paid by security forces to the locality behind the school, from where at least seven armed men broke into the premises on December 16, in an attack that saw them go room by room, killing 149 people in all, the deadliest attack in Pakistan’s history.
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