PESHAWAR: The military and intelligence top brass went into a huddle here on Saturday to discuss measures to be taken in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attack on the Bacha Khan University (BKU) while five alleged ‘facilitators’ of the assault were presented before media as a proof of the progress made in the investigation so far.

Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif visited Peshawar and went into a brain-storming session with his military and operational commanders and the chiefs of the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Military Intelligence to review security measures following the attack on the Charsadda campus that claimed 21 lives.

“This is a challenge. There are gaps and loopholes,” Lt Gen Asim Bajwa, director general of the Inter Services Public Relations, said at a news conference.

“As a nation, we have to stay united and not allow terrorists to succeed.”

Army chief goes into a huddle with ISI, MI heads in Peshawar

He brought the five suspects before the media and spoke about the role they had allegedly played in facilitating the attack. Gen Bajwa played the audio clip of a conversation between the mastermind of the assault, Khalifa Mansoor, and a reporter, and displayed the Afghan mobile phone number from which the call was made.

He made it clear that none of the official statements from Pakistan had held the Afghan government responsible for the attack. The army chief, in his calls to President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, had shared with them information about the attack, he said.

“Nobody has said that the Afghan government is involved (in the attack),” he said. “Information has been shared with them and that process is continuing,” he said.

He said that the call of the attack’s mastermind originated from Afghanistan. He was using an Afghan SIM to direct the assailants.

Gen Bajwa said that sale of Afghan SIMs in Pakistan was illegal and referred to a statement by the Pakistan Telecommunication Autho­rity that it had raised the issue of the roaming facility with Afghanistan, but there was no response from it.

He said that the intelligence agencies were working on the money trail used for the university attack, adding that he would not say anything further on the issue till the investigations were completed.

He said that the four attackers were sent (from Afghanistan) by Habib alias Qari Zakir, deputy to the mastermind Khalifa Mansoor. They were received by Akbar Haji alias Adil, a resident of Mardan, at the regular border crossing point in Torkham.

Adil, who is now in custody, took the assailants to his house near Mardan’s ring road and then shifted them to another house owned by Mohammad Riaz, another suspect who is also in custody. Riaz is the brother-in-law of Qari Zakir.

The military spokesman said that Adil, a mason by profession, had worked at the university for a few days during which he had made a drawing of the campus, and helped the attackers carry out recce of the site.

He said that two other suspects, who had bought the rickshaw to transport the attackers to the campus, had also been picked up.

A suspected facilitator referred to as “Terrorist A”, his wife and niece, who had bought weapons used in the strike from Darra Admakhel and transported them to Mardan, were at large, he said and expressed the hope that they would be arrested soon.

Of the four attackers, he said, only one had been identified as Amir Rehman from Sararogha in South Waziristan.

Investigations and forensic tests were being conducted to ascertain the identity of the other three.

Since the launch of Operation Zarb-i-Azb in June 2014, the ISPR chief said, more than 21,000 suspects had been arrested in nearly 14,000 intelligence-based operations and 200 killed while resisting arrests.

Security forces were working on improving border management to check the flow of terrorists, he said but added that it was humanly impossible to seal the 2600km border with Afghanistan.

Asked if the army chief had set up a realistic goal in his statement that 2016 would see the end of terrorism given the uptick in terrorist acts in January, the spokesman said that there was no reason not to be optimistic. But he also pointed that terrorism was an international phenomenon. “We will have to be determined and stay the course”, he concluded.

In the audio intercept, the mastermind, while confirming that the attack on the BKU campus was a repeat of December 2014’s strike on the Army Public School in Peshawar, can be heard asking, “those who are being sent to the gallows, who are they?” Then he says that the students killed in the university attack were part of the “evil political and democratic system”. “I have targeted the university because if you kill our facilitators, we will kill yours.”

“They (the military) have pledged to eliminate our facilitators and started implementing the plan; 322 have been sent to the gallows and 21,000 operations have been conducted against us”, the mastermind says. “They call them (those hanged) our facilitators. So we will call them (those in the university) their facilitators,” he says.

In a video released just after the carnage at the campus, Khalifa Mansoor threatened to carry out more attacks on schools, colleges and universities throughout Pakistan. “From now on, we will target their colleges, universities and schools. I will not kill their soldiers in their cantonments. I will not kill their judges in their courts and I will not kill their politicians in their parliament. These schools and colleges are their nurseries where they are nurtured. We have made a pledge that we will kill them in their nurseries and eliminate these very foundations,” he said in the 1 minute, 39 seconds video.

Our correspondent adds from Charsadda: Security forces handed over the bodies of the four attackers to police here on Saturday.

Sources said that the bodies were handed over to the district police chief Khalid Suhail after completion of forensic and other investigations on the bodies.

Police buried the bodies in a local graveyard.

Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2016