PESHAWAR: Unidentified gunmen kidnapped two members of a polio survey team on Tuesday in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, a police official confirmed.

Gunmen initially kidnapped four members of the team from the remote village Umar Khan in Tank district, District Police Officer (DPO) Iftikhar Ali Shah said. However, they later freed two members of the team, a woman named Shaila Noor and the driver, Waheed Khan. The remaining two, Zulfiqar and Muhammad Shuaib, remain missing, Shah said.

No group has claimed responsibility for the incident.

“The kidnappers later freed the lady worker and the driver while the rest two have gone missing,” Shah told Arab News.

Pakistan remains one of only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic. So far this year, there have been seven cases of polio caused by the virus — all in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Many Pakistanis are suspicious of foreign entities funding polio vaccination campaigns and of the government itself. The doubts and fears have led to attacks on polio teams and the law enforcers guarding them, especially in KP.

Pakistan launched a national anti-polio five-day campaign on Oct. 2 to inoculate 44 million children under the age of 5.

Shah said the team, also known as the Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) team, had gone to the far-flung village to carry out a quality assessment exercise in the wake of the campaign in the area. 

Shortly after the incident, Shah said a heavy police contingent went to the village to rescue the missing polio workers. However, they were told by the locals that the gunmen, almost 10 in number, had fled to the adjacent mountainous South Waziristan tribal area.

“The dilemma is that the polio team went to the area for monitoring without any security detail, without informing either the district administration or the police,” he added.