Bacha Khan University in Charsadda Under Terrorist Attack
Security forces in north-west Pakistan are battling militants inside a college in the town of Charsadda, with at least five deaths.The army said four gunmen had been killed but others were thought to be holding out in Bacha Khan University as shooting continued.
Some students have been rescued, Deputy Inspector General Saeed Wazir said. At least three people were injured.
More than 130 students were killed at a school in nearby Peshawar in 2014.
Charsadda is about 50km (30 miles) from the city.
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It appears the attackers set off explosions when they stormed the university at around 09:30 local time (04:30 GMT) on Wednesday.
Police and soldiers, backed by armoured vehicles, surrounded the campus and an evacuation got under way.
An emergency official, Bilal Faizi, told AFP news agency he had seen five dead bodies, all with bullet wounds.
An unnamed rescue official was quoted by other media as saying up to eight people may have been killed, not including the gunmen.
An assistant professor at the university, Dr Shakoor, told that he had turned back from the main gate of the campus after being told it was under attack.
Most of the students and members of the faculty would probably still not have arrived when the attack started, he said.
He saw people coming out through the main gate, apparently because the attackers had entered the campus from the back, where there is a university guesthouse.
Dr Shakoor said he suspected the attack might have been targeting a poetry gathering scheduled to honour a Pashtun nationalist leader from the Partition era, Bacha Khan, after whom the university is named.
The nationalists, represented by the ANP party, opposed the Taliban and Islamist resistance to the Soviets in neighbouring Afghanistan back in the 1980s, the BBC’s Ilyas Khan says. As such, an attack on the university holds symbolic value for Islamists, our correspondent says.
The university is located in an open area some distance east of Charsadda town, surrounded by open agricultural fields, and is therefore a soft target, he notes.
Bacha Khan is a new university, founded in 2012, its website says.
Just days ago, some schools in Peshawar were closed by the authorities amid reports that militants were planning an attack.
Are you in Charsadda? Have you been affected by what has been happening? If it is safe to do so, you can get in touch by emailing info@pakmediarevolution.net