Gunmen Kill Health Workers From Pakistan Polio Drive
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Version 0 of 1. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen killed two female health workers and one police guard in northwestern Pakistan in the latest attack on people involved in a polio immunization campaign. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but the Pakistani Taliban have repeatedly targeted health workers on anti-polio drives, accusing them of being spies. The violence has seriously hindered the immunization campaign in Pakistan, one of three countries where polio remains endemic. Successive governments have vowed to ensure health workers’ safety, but such efforts have been unsuccessful. The attack Tuesday occurred in a remote, mountainous area of Mansehra district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. “The two-member team was administering polio drops in an Afghan refugee camp and its surrounding areas when two gunmen opened fire on them,” the local police chief, Muhammad Ejaz Khan, was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. The gunmen escaped. Resistance to polio vaccination is particularly strong in the country’s northwest, and in recent years it has also increased in Baluchistan Province in the southwest. Hard-line Islamists have long opposed the vaccination campaign as un-Islamic and a conspiracy to make people infertile. |