KARACHI: Getting admitted to the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) a day after arriving in Karachi, nine students and a teacher of the Army Public School, Peshawar, received treatment for their injuries on Thursday as another batch of six injured students and two teachers arrived here.

In all, 35 injured of the APS attack, including students and teachers, will get admitted to the AKUH for treatment over the period of 10 days.

Accompanying the children are their families who refused to speak to the media when they were approached in the main hall of the hospital. The decision to avoid speaking to the media was taken by the Shuhada-o-Ghazi Forum, a body of the parents of the victims of the attack, to avoid confusion and varying statements regarding the treatment of the children, explained spokesperson for the forum Qaiser Ali.

Also read: APS students reach Karachi for further treatment

After losing his son in the APS carnage on Dec 16, 2014, Mr Ali decided to create the forum comprising the grieving parents who he said wanted to take the situation in their control. Soon after the tragedy, the families of 143 those who lost their lives and 151 injured created the forum to help each other. It was through the platform of the forum that the families decided to move their children to Karachi for advanced treatment as opposed to the “first-aid treatment” they were receiving in Peshawar.

Speaking to Dawn, Mr Ali said the children and teachers would receive treatment at the orthopaedic and neurosurgery wards including plastic surgery needed for some students. “Some students still have bullets in their bodies, some teachers still complain of feeling splinters in their back and hip bone, others need immediate neurosurgery as the required time to carry out such a surgery is running out,” he said.

He explained that one of the students, “Amin Mehboob, is mentally unstable at the moment for not getting the required treatment needed for his head injury. We fear that one of the students, Umair Khan, might lose his right arm that gradually lost movement after the injury he received there.”

KP govt promise

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, he recalled, had announced on Feb 5 that the families of the injured would receive Rs1,500,000 for further treatment. “But we haven’t heard from them since then. At the same time, we don’t have time to wait for these promises to materialise, as some of these students need immediate help,” he added.

He explained that speaking of an injured brought to mind an image of a person who survived but he said it was important to understand under what circumstances such people were surviving. “For instance, one of our children, Ishaq Ameen, is in a coma and on the ventilator at the Combined Military Hospital, Peshawar. We can’t bring him to Karachi, but we immediately shifted those who we could,” he said, while rushing towards the airport to receive the six students and the two teachers who arrived on Thursday.

Mr Ali added that the children and teachers “are receiving a lot of help and assistance from the AKUH as well as the Sindh government and we really need that help to continue.”

Around 35 injured of the Peshawar APS attack, including students and teachers, will come to Karachi over the period of 10 days. Most of them need treatment for hip, back and head injuries, while some need attention to the injuries on their arms and fingers or after losing their fingers to prevent bacterial infection.

The parents and relatives of the students and teachers of the APS were sitting in the main hall of the hospital and while they were asked not to speak to the media, one of them, a father, said: “If the same incident had occurred in any other country, the entire nation would have surrounded the hospitals to tend to the injured. But things work differently in our country; we need to know the ethnicity of the people before feeling their pain or rushing to help them. And eventually this will strike us as wrong and rude if it happens to one of our own.”

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2015

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