‘I sent him to school like any other day but never saw him alive again’

Using the corner of her blue-and-orange floral shawl to wipe away her tears, Anila Rizwan leans back against the thickly upholstered sofa in her modest home in Peshawar in Pakistan and sighs in despair. Staring at a framed photograph of a smartly dressed teenage boy on the table next to her, she breaks down, struggling to speak about the harrowing day that took away her son. ‘This month last year he was with me and then I lost him forever,’ says the 40-year-old.

‘I sent Maheer to school on December 16 like I did any other day but I never saw him alive again.’ She hugs the framed photo tightly to her chest and sobs.

‘It’s been 12 months, but it hasn’t gotten any easier,’ she sobs. ‘It breaks my heart every time I think of him. This day is hard, I can’t accept a year has gone by without my boy.

‘The memory of his voice echoes in my head every day. I can’t detach from him, and I don’t want to. He had so many dreams, so many things he wanted to do. How can this be?’

The gunmen were all reported to have been killed by security forces during the attack. Four other men linked to the massacre were executed in a prison in the city of Kohat earlier this month. What role they played in the shooting was not confirmed.

‘He was always late for school,’ she says, her voice choking. ‘He would be late and would make his siblings late too. That morning he had fried eggs for breakfast and rushed off with his sister Mehreen and brother Arham following behind him.’

Once the children left home, and her husband Rizwan went to his office, Anila, who was five months pregnant at the time, got ready to go to college – where she was studying for a degree – less than a kilometre away from her son’s school. It was there that she got the first shock of the day. ‘At around 11am one of the teachers told me that a school in the neighbourhood had been attacked by gunmen,’ she says.

Tears stinging her eyes, clutching her swollen tummy, she was, however, prevented by security forces from entering the school. The police and gunmen were exchanging fire and she could hear the loud thuds of gunfire.

‘I was stopped by army men, who had cordoned off the area,’ she says. ‘I immediately called my husband on my mobile phone and told him to come quickly.

‘I then came to know that my younger son was safe, but Maheer was nowhere to be found. At that point I honestly didn’t think he would be hurt. I assumed all the kids had been locked up in a classroom as hostages and maybe we would need to pick them up and take them home,’ she remembers.

Anila was not alone. Hundreds of parents had rushed to the school area on hearing about the incident and were now desperately waiting for news of their children.

Anila waited all day by the barriers the army men had created on Warsak Road as her husband Rizwan, 44, searched hospitals after rumours that some children had been rushed there. ‘I then accepted that Maheer may possibly be injured. I wondered for a while if someone had taken him to a hospital, which is why he wasn’t coming out.’ But at 5.30pm Anila’s brother came running towards her. ‘He touched my arm and said: “Come, we have found Maheer”,’ says Anila.

‘But he was shaking. I could tell on his face it wasn’t good. I asked him if Maheer was OK. He kept on saying, “Come, you need to come.” But I didn’t move. I repeated my question. Finally, eventually, he held my hand tightly and said “Maheer is dead”.

‘I refused to believe him. I kept thinking it was a mistake. I felt I was in a terrible nightmare and soon I’d wake up and everything would be normal.’

Her grief was uncontrollable. Breaking down she kept repeating ‘no, no, it cannot happen. I just saw him in the morning’.

Anila later found out that Maheer had in fact been one of the first children killed in the shooting.

His body had been rushed to a nearby hospital after the security personnel had killed the gunmen. However, no one had identified the boy until her brother, who like her husband was looking in all the nearby hospitals, recognised the boy, who was lying on a bed in the hospital.

Anila’s brother rushed her to the hospital, where hundreds of parents and family members of the other children were screaming and crying in anguish on learning about the fate of their children.

He led her to a bed where a small body was lying covered in white sheet.

‘When I saw him lying in the hospital he had a tag on his foot with “19”’ written on it. Apparently, he was the 19th body to have been found that day. And all the while I had been waiting near the school and hoping he would be alive,’ says Anila.

‘It’s absolutely tragic that my son was killed in the exact place where he was trying to better his future.’

She would later learn from news reports that seven gunmen, disguised in uniforms of the Pakistani paramilitary force, entered the school from the back, scaling the walls.

Clutching automatic weapons, they headed straight for the auditorium located in the centre of the school’s complex and opened fire on the children who had gathered there for first-aid training.

‘He wanted to be a scientist and experiment with software engineering. He often told me he would take me to meet Bill Gates one day. He had dreams, he had things he wanted to do with his life.’

In May this year, Anila gave birth to Zuraiz.

‘We’ve been blessed with another son – look at him and see Maheer,’ Anila says, hugging her little boy. ‘But it breaks my heart that they never met. Zuraiz will never know his proud big brother.

‘On hard days I look at my baby and try to see the positives in life. But I cannot understand what happened. Thankfully my children are very close to one another. My two eldest have grieved for their brother.’

Anila says that the incident has changed her outlook on life. ‘I am very protective of them now. I am careful about where they go and what they do. I am not at peace until they are back home with me. Even their school is not safe anymore.’

Anila and Rizwan have since received Rs500,000 (Dh17,540) by the provincial Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as compensation for Maheer’s death. The family has also been presented with a Medal of Honour and a Certificate of Honour by Pakistan Chief of Army Staff.

But Anila cannot come to terms with the pointless way in which her son was killed by gunmen.

‘The money cannot compensate for our loss. It is just lying in the bank,’ she says.

‘I still have nightmares of the day. I hope no parent ever has to suffer like this.’