Pakistanis praise teenage hero who sacrificed himself to stop a suicide bomber

About 2,000 students attend the school in Hangu where Aitzaz Hasan, 15, laid down his life by tackling the bomber.

KARACHI // Pakistanis have declared their admiration and support for a teenager who was killed as he stopped a suicide bomber from entering his school in the country’s north-west.

Aitzaz Hasan, 15, was standing outside of his school in Hangu, a town bordering the militant-riven tribal belt, as a punishment for being late to the morning assembly, two students said.

A man approached the front gate, and when the boys spotted him holding a detonator Hasan tackled the bomber, who detonated his suicide belt.

About 2,000 students were in the school at the time of Monday’s attack.

Hangu lies in the Shiite-majority Ibrahimzai region. The Sunni terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the bombing, which is believed to be the first at a school in the country that has lost tens of thousands of civilian lives in terrorist attacks by Islamist militant groups since 2001.

There has been an outpouring of tributes to Hasan’s courage by Pakistanis on social media and commentators in the English-language media, with a growing chorus of calls for the Pakistani government to give him the country’s highest military honour, the Nishan-e-Haidar.

“Hangu’s shaheed Aitzaz Hasan is Pakistan’s pride. Give him a medal at least. Another young one with heart-stopping courage #AitzazBraveheart,’ Sherry Rehman, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, tweeted on Thursday.

Others highlighted the slow reaction from the provincial and federal governments, as officials did not visit the Hasan family until Wednesday evening, after the teenager’s story spread on social media.

Islamabad is struggling to implement a coherent counter-terrorism strategy. Both the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government of former cricket star Imran Khan’s Pakistan Movement for Justice party as well as the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz advocate negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban that has waged an insurgency and terrorist campaign against Pakistan since 2007.

Critics of strategy of the talks point to a string of agreements with the government that the militants have broken in recent years, and accuse Islamabad of stalling to avoid the tough decisions necessary in tackling Pakistan’s endemic terrorism and militancy.

“We live in a land where a young child, had to give his life fighting a scourge that our own leaders bend over backwards in an attempt to appease,” the columnist Zarrar Khuro wrote on Thursday in Dawn newspaper. “There is sorrow and rage because a nation that can produce such lions does not deserve to be led by such lambs.”