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Judge orders probe into Peshawar school massacre

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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