A soldier walks past blood on the auditorium floor at the Army Public School, which was attacked by Taliban gunmen.

Peshawar: The Pakistani Taliban has threatened to follow Tuesday's murderous attack on an army-run school in the northern city of Peshawar with yet more violence against the army and security forces.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, accused the government of killing Taliban fighters in prison and detaining their family members and demanded that the Pakistani army halt its offensive into North Waziristan. In a statement emailed on Wednesday, the TTP said it "was forced to take this extreme step to target this school where children of army officers and soldiers were studying", adding "unless demands are met, TTP will be forced to target every institution affiliated with the army or security forces nationwide".

As the death toll from the Peshawar massacre rose to 144 – mostly schoolchildren – Pakistan's government on Wednesday lifted a moratorium on executing convicted terrorists.   

Mr Nawaz Sharif visiting a student injured in the Peshawar school massacre.

About 8000 convicts languish on death row in Pakistani prisons, one of the world's largest death-row populations, including more than 3000 convicted terrorists. Pakistan's ceremonial president, Mamnoon Hussain, responded immediately on Wednesday by rejecting mercy petitions filed by eight convicted terrorists in 2012, and his office ordered the administrators of the prisons where they're being held to carry out the executions, the Pakistani media reported.

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The leaders of Pakistan's political parties set aside bitter rivalries at a conference in Peshawar, called by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to develop a consensus on legislation dealing with the trials and convictions of terrorists, an issue that successive governments have failed to settle since the Pakistani Taliban launched an insurgency in 2007. Mr Sharif set the agenda by announcing that he had lifted a six-year moratorium on capital punishment.

"The biggest issue right now is that of hardened terrorists who've been arrested ... when they are not convicted, they return to their havens and carry out further acts of terror. Until and unless this issue is resolved, we cannot resolve the terrorism problem," Mr Sharif said, adding that all the political leaders pledged "to fight terrorism until the last terrorist is eliminated from our soil". 

Politician Imran Khan, center, leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, prays with his aides for the victims killed in Tuesday's Taliban attack.

"We are all together," said opposition political leader Imran Khan. "Our difference aside, terrorism is a national issue. We are standing with the federal government."

Police, prosecutors and judges who handle terrorist cases have been threatened and murdered, making most reluctant to pursue such cases. And convictions have been difficult to secure. Pakistan's democratic constitution requires that defendants' lawyers have access to prosecution evidence and witnesses, potentially exposing classified information. Only the military's security agencies have access to advanced forensic-evidence techniques – such as cross-referencing explosive residue from bombing scenes with databases of materials used in previous attacks – and they've been reluctant to expose that intelligence in court. The security agencies clashed with the judiciary last year over their indefinite detention of terrorism suspects and refusal to produce them in court.

It was too early to say whether the words from the nation's political and military leaders will translate into forceful action to combat the Pakistani Taliban in their strongholds, experts said.

"The nation expects more from an all-party conference than simply the formation of a committee," Taimur Rehman, a political science professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. "The government should have already had a game plan ready and presented that to the parties and public," he said.

TheThepopular groundswell to suppress the Taliban may not endure, said Anatol Lieven, the author of "Pakistan: A Hard Country", in a phone interview from Doha, Qatar. "Pakistani public opinion has been astonishingly unmoved about going after the Taliban despite everything, and has befuddled itself with conspiracies that 'This isn't the Taliban. It's the Indian intelligence service.'"

There was "real, mass support" for military operations against the Taliban in 2009 when they occupied the northern Swat valley and appeared to be advancing toward Islamabad, Lieven said. That support dissipated during 2011, when U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and American troops mistakenly killed Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border, he added.

Calls from politicians and the Pakistani media for forceful military action against militant groups throughout the nation, not just in the Afghan border areas, would be one indication in the coming weeks of a widespread desire for a crackdown, Lieven said.

TNS, Bloomberg