"Children were forced to watch as their teacher was burned alive": Survivors reveal horror inside Pakistan school as nine Taliban gunmen bomb and shoot to death over 140 children

Nine Taliban gunmen stormed a military school in the north-western Pakistani city in the worst ever militant attack to hit the troubled region. 

A source told NBC: ‘They burnt a teacher in front of the students in a classroom. They literally set the teacher on fire with gasoline and made the kids watch.’

One suicide bomber is believed to have blown himself up in a room full of 60 children while there were reports that some of the victims arriving at a hospital in Peshawar had been beheaded, though Pakistani authorities have yet to confirm this.

The corridors of the city’s Combined Military Hospital were lined with dead students, their green-and-yellow school uniform ties peeping out of white body bags.

One distraught family member was given the wrong body because the faces of many children were badly burned as a result of the suicide bomb explosions.

By nightfall, the death toll had reached 146, with one politician suggesting that 140 of those were children with 113 people injured. Earlier reports said that 130 children had been killed.

As the city began the devastating task of treating the horrifically wounded and identifying the dead, one grieving father told MailOnline: ‘This is a terrible injustice. We are innocent people, my boys are innocents who do not carry guns and bombs.’

Meanwhile, terrifying accounts of the children’s ordeal began to emerge.

A 10-year-old boy caught up in the massacre has spoken of his dramatic escape from Taliban gunmen as bullets whizzed past his head – having seen two of his classmates shot dead in front of him.