TANK: Citing the district health officer, gunmen attacked and killed a security member assigned to protect a polio vaccination team in Tank, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
When armed individuals on a motorcycle assaulted the polio security team in Tank, Dera Ismail Khan region of KP, one security official was killed and another was injured.
The armed men fled the scene, and a police search operation to find them is underway, DPO Sajjad Ahmed told Geo News.
The body of the martyred security personnel and injured are being shifted to the hospital, the DHO stated.
On the other hand, the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed that its fighters attacked the polio team in Tank.
Not the first time
Extremist groups often target polio teams and security assigned to protect them, claiming the vaccination campaigns are a conspiracy to sterilise children.
In August, constable Dilawar Khan was on his way to polio duty in Dera Ismail Khan when unidentified assailants opened fire on him near the Atal Sharif area of Kalachi Tehsil, killing him on the spot while the accused fled, police had reported.
In a second attack in the month of August, a Frontier Reserve Police officer was shot dead by unidentified persons in Peshawar within the limits of the Daudzai police station.
The crippling disease
The WHO deemed Pakistan and Afghanistan as dangerous countries in a recent statement by the Thirtieth Polio IHR Emergency Committee, stating that the two countries have failed to eradicate polio fully and may be responsible for the virus’s global spread.
Pakistan, on the other hand, has achieved amazing progress against polio, with the number of cases of Wild Polio Virus (WPV1) falling to zero in the last ten months, down from 84 in 2020.
Pakistan’s main issue, according to the Committee, is dealing with “persistently missed youngsters” in core reservoirs, as well as parental refusals and troublesome polio vaccination programmes in sensitive areas.
