2014 Peshawar school massacre

On 16 December 2014, six gunmen affiliated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) conducted a terrorist attack on the Army Public School in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. The terrorists, all of whom were foreign nationals, comprising one Chechen, three Arabs and two Afghans, entered the school and opened fire on school staff and children, killing 149 people including 132 schoolchildren ranging between eight and eighteen years of age, making it the world's fifth deadliest school massacre. Pakistan launched a rescue operation undertaken by the Pakistan Army's Special Services Group (SSG) special forces, who killed all six terrorists and rescued 960 people. In the long term, the national outrage against the targeted killing of schoolchildren led to Pakistan establishing the National Action Plan to crack down on terrorism.

According to various news agencies and commentators, the nature and preparation of the attack was very similar to that of the Beslan school hostage crisis that occurred in the North Ossetia–Alania region of the Russian Federation in 2004.

Pakistan responded to the attacks by lifting its moratorium on the death penalty, committing more resources to the War in North-West Pakistan, and authorizing military courts to try civilians through a constitutional amendment. On 2 December 2015, Pakistan hanged four militants involved in the Peshawar massacre. Two other militants had committed suicide by bombing themselves in the massacre. The mastermind of the attack, Omar Khorasani, was killed in Afghanistan on 7 August 2022 by a roadside mine. The Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld the death sentences of two more convicts involved in the attack in the Said Zaman Khan v. Federation of Pakistan case on 29 August 2016.