Children are pictured as Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) activists rally for the victims of the Peshawar school massacre, in Lahore on December 21, 2014.

Pakistan’s prime minister rejected appeals by four militants sentenced to death in the Peshawar school massacre, saying Thursday that those behind the country’s deadliest-ever terror attack deserved “no mercy.”

With the anniversary of the Dec. 16, 2014 attack approaching, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif advised President Mamnoon Hussain to reject the mercy petitions appealing the executions.

The massacre — in which Taliban gunmen coldly slaughtered more than 150 people, most of them children, at an army-run school in the northwestern city — shocked and outraged a country already scarred by nearly a decade of attacks.

“Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif has advised the president to reject the mercy petitions of all four convicted terrorists of Army Public School Peshawar terrorist attack,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.

Sharif said by rejecting the mercy petitions he was “honoring the promise made to the families” of the children killed in the tragedy, according to the statement.

No date for the executions has been announced.

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