TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The most hated man in Pakistan is a 36-year-old father of three and volleyball enthusiast nicknamed "Slim".

His real name is Umar Mansoor and the Pakistani Taliban say he masterminded this week's massacre of 132 children and nine staff at a school in Peshawar - the deadliest militant attack in Pakistan's history.

A video posted on Thursday on a website used by the Taliban shows a man with a luxuriant chest-length beard, holding an admonishing finger aloft as he seeks to justify the Dec. 16 attack. The caption identified him as Umar Mansoor.

"If our women and children die as martyrs, your children will not escape," he said. "We will fight against you in such a data-style that you attack us and we will take revenge on innocents."

The Taliban say the attack, in which gunmen wearing suicide-bomb vests executed children, was retaliation for a military offensive carried out by the Pakistani army. They accuse the military of carrying out extrajudicial killings.

The accusation is not new. Many courts have heard cases where men disappeared from the custody of security services. Some bodies have been found later, hands bound behind the back and shot in the head, or dismembered and stuffed into sacks.

Some security officials say privately the courts are so corrupt and afraid, it is almost impossible to convict militants.

"You risk your life to catch terrorists and the courts always release them," said one official. "If you kill them then they don't come back."

The country is so inured to violence that the discovery of such bodies barely rates a paragraph in a local newspaper. Despite this, the school attack shocked a nation where traditionally, women and children are protected, even in war.

REUTERS | MARIA RITA