Suspected militants kill two police officers guarding polio workers in Pakistan

OPA WIRE, Nov 3 (OPA) — Suspected militants riding a motorcycle shot and killed two police officers assigned to protect polio workers during a door-to-door vaccination campaign Tuesday in northwestern Pakistan, officials said. The drive-by shooting in Mohmand, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that borders Afghanistan, also wounded a third officer. The police officers were traveling to a nearby village to guard vaccination teams when they came under fire, police officer Ayaz Khan said.

The attackers fled the scene immediately following the assault. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups regularly target anti-polio drives and police protecting health workers, falsely claiming that polio vaccination campaigns are part of a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned the attack as intolerable and offered his condolences to the families of the slain officers. Separately, suspected militants the previous day abducted four polio workers in Tank, another district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a statement from provincial Gov. Faisal Karim Kundi, who urged authorities to secure their safe release.

Pakistan launched a nationwide campaign Monday to vaccinate 24 million children against polio as part of ongoing efforts to eradicate the disease. Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only countries where wild poliovirus is endemic, according to the World Health Organization.