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A policeman guarding a polio vaccination team was shot dead by militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Orakzai district on Tuesday, following which two attackers were also killed, police said.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where polio remains endemic, and vaccination teams are frequently targeted by militants waging a campaign against security forces.
On Monday, Pakistan launched a week-long vaccination campaign with the aim of immunising more than 45 million children under the age of five.
Malik Sikandar, a senior police officer in Orakzai, told AFP: “Two militants attacked a policeman guarding a polio vaccination team.
“The policeman died at the scene. A police team later chased down and killed two attackers and their local facilitator,” he added.
Another police official, Naveedullah Khan, confirmed the fatality and told AFP that two vaccination workers on the team “were inside the home during the attack and remained safe”.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in KP, which has long been a hive of militant activity.
Pakistan has seen a surge in polio cases this year, recording 41 so far in 2024 compared with six in 2023.
Polio vaccination teams, made up of health workers and police guards, have often come under attack in the restive and mountainous regions bordering Afghanistan.
Last month, dozens of policemen, who accompany medical teams during door-to-door campaigns, went on strike in the Bannu district after a string of militant attacks targeting them.
Prior to the strike, a police officer and a polio worker had been shot dead in Bajaur district’s Salarzai tehsil when unknown assailants attacked a polio vaccination team.
Scores of polio vaccination workers and their escorts have been killed over the years. Since 2012, 126 persons have been killed and 201 injured in attacks targeting healthcare workers and officials of the polio programme, according to a Dawn report published last month.
In one of the most high-profile attacks, Dr Abdul Rehman, a polio programme official, was killed in Bajaur earlier this year.
Pockets of Pakistan’s border regions remain resistant to inoculation as a result of misinformation, conspiracy theories and some firebrand clerics declaring the jabs un-Islamic.
Opposition grew after the US Central Intelligence Agency organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
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