THE top judge in Pakistan 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 last Thursday (10). Relatives of the victims – mainly children – have called for a probe into 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 December 16 that year. No government or military official has ever been held to account for the security failings. Supreme court chief justice Mian Saqib Nisar ordered the formation of a judicial commission to examine the attack during a hearing in Peshawar last Wednesday (9), Abdul Latif Yousafzai, advocate general of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said. 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. The alleged mastermind behind the school attack was killed in a drone strike in 2017, according to the Pakistani Taliban, who have claimed responsibility for it. Pakistan has said it has hanged at least four men involved in the attack, though the nature of their role has not been made public.
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