PESHAWAR: “How can you forget it when a person, who has been sitting next to you in the class for the last six or seven years, just dies in your lap,” questioned Amir Ameen, whose best friend Aimal Khan was shot dead by terrorists in front of him in the Tuesday’s attack on Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar.

Both friends were sitting in the college corridor with other classmates after taking intermediate examination when they heard four gunmen running and shooting. The boys took shelter in a nearby chemistry laboratory but to no avail. Terrorists came to the laboratory and started shooting them mercilessly.

As Amir Ameen recalls the horrific incident which left him scarred for life and snatched away his best friend, his facial expressions show as if he has just seen a ghost. His voice shivers.

“I kept lying for more than an hour quietly. I feared the terrorists would come back,” he said. He was rescued by soldiers after a long frightful hour. However, he was distraught at the thought that his best friend was gone, forever.

Amir, a student of intermediate at Army Public School and Degree College, was brutally shot at but he survived only because terrorists thought he was dead.

Amir’s brother Ishaq Ameen is also critically injured. He is fighting for his life in Combined Military Hospital. Amir is being treated for his injuries at Lady Reading Hospital.

As he narrated the horrific details his teary-eyed young cousin was standing by his bedside holding his hand and trying to comfort the boy. However, Amir went on purging his pent up grief and sense of loss.

There were four teachers and six boys, who tried to hide in the laboratory also, he continued. “All of them were shot in the head. Only I survived because I fainted and they thought I was dead,” he added, recalling the horror and saying that he never saw so much blood and dead in his life.

“It was like a horror movie. Only it was real,” said Amir. He seemed concerned about another of his injured friends Saad Hassan, who also got seriously injured and there was no news about him. “It is hard to forget my best friend Aimal whose funeral was held last evening,” said the traumatised boy.

Some boys were still holding on to hope of seeing their friends well again. Azeemullah, an eighth grader, who remained unhurt miraculously in the shooting, was standing outside a ward where his friend and cousin Anas was being treated.

He seemed calm while he spoke of how he saw terrorists shooting school boys, including his friends.

It was so sudden and shocking, he said.

“I still can’t believe I survived.

My friend Waleed was shot in the mouth and another one was injured too,” said Azeemullah.

Haris Khan, whose uncle Mohammad Idrees was an English teacher at Army Public School and College, said that his uncle’s son also got shot and was being treated at Lady Reading Hospital.

“He is like my brother and we are thankful that he is alive,” said Haris Khan.

A number of people at Lady Reading Hospital, waiting on their injured friends and family members, seemed to be in trauma as many of them could not even speak of their grief and only tears rolled down their pale cheeks. A veiled Farah hailing from Bannu whose teenage cousin was also injured in the attack was first unable to share how angry and hurt she felt. She expressed her anger at the terrorists as well as government.

“We don’t feel safe at all,” said Farah while criticising the security forces for what she called their failure to stop terrorist attacks. She said that she had seen the injured and dead boys, who were killed in such a brutal way that it reminded one of ‘Karbala’ tragedy.

The entire Peshawar was shrouded in mourning as those, who were not even related to the victims of the attack, were saddened by the incident. There was no other topic for conversation but only condemnation of terrorist attack and sharing sorrow over the gruesome incident, which left 132 students killed and many parents heart-broken for the rest of their life.

Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2014