AFP, Islamabad :Students grieving for their classmates massacred by the Pakistani Taliban Thursday vowed to defy the militants and return to school as soon as possible.A team of gunmen stormed the Army Public School in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, slaughtering 148 people including 132 children in the restive country’s deadliest ever terror attack.Schools in Islamabad beefed up security on Thursday and carried out safety drills amid fears of a possible bomb attack targeting school buses.As the nation observed a second day of official mourning, at the school gates in Peshawar there was defiance and a burning desire for revenge against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), whose seven-year insurgency has killed thousands of ordinary people.In Islamabad civil society activists protested outside the radical Red Mosque after its hardline cleric refused to condemn the massacre on a television talk-show.Much of the school was devastated in the eight-hour rampage, with walls peppered with bullets and shrapnel from suicide blasts and walls and floors awash with blood.But officials pledged to clean and restore the buildings and reopen on January 4 — less than three weeks after the attack.There were emotional scenes outside the school as hundreds of students and parents gathered to light candles and leave flowers for the dead.Mohammad Billal, 14, told AFP he would defy his parents’ advice to stay at home, and return to school as soon as he could.”I will come the moment it opens because I am not scared of terrorists. I know how to send a message to them,” Billal said.Moakal Jan, 13, lost nine of his friends in the attack but told AFP he too had no fears about returning.
