Peshawar (Pakistan): Gunmen shot dead two police officers guarding a polio vaccination team on Tuesday, officials said, as Pakistan faces a recent resurgence of polio infections.
The only countries where polio remains endemic are Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, where vaccination teams are often targeted by extremists conducting operations against security forces.
On Monday, health workers began a week-long vaccination drive aimed at immunizing more than 45 million children aged five and older.
“Two militants attacked a police officer guarding a polio vaccination team,” said Malik Sikandar, a senior official in the northwestern town of Orakzai.
“One police officer died at the scene and the second succumbed to his injuries,” he told AFP as he was being taken to hospital, adding that police officers were chasing the two attackers and a local accomplice. He added that he was killed.
Another police official, Naveed Ullah Khan, told AFP that the team’s two vaccination workers “were inside the house during the attack and remained safe.”
No organization immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The province has long been a base for extremist activities by the Pakistani Taliban and other groups.
Police said the vaccination campaign was suspended in the attacked areas but continued elsewhere in Orakzai.
Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in polio cases this year, with 41 cases recorded so far in 2024, up from six in 2023.
“The terrorist attack on the polio team is an attack on Pakistan’s secure future,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said in a statement.
Polio vaccination teams, made up of medical workers and police guards, are under frequent attack in the unstable mountainous region that borders Afghanistan.
Some in Pakistan’s border regions continue to resist vaccination due to misinformation, conspiracy theories and some clerics declaring the vaccine un-Islamic.
Islamist opposition grew after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down and kill al-Qaeda’s then-leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Last month, dozens of Pakistani police officers accompanying medical teams on door-to-door operations went on strike following a series of militant attacks targeting them.
Over the years, scores of polio vaccination workers and their guards have been killed.
