PESHAWAR: A senior official of the polio eradication program was killed and a policeman wounded in a gun attack in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, officials said on Friday.
Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the vehicle of Dr. Abdul Rehman, focal person for the polio eradication program in the Bajaur tribal district, in the district’s Loi Mamund town, when he was leaving for duty at a local hospital, according to Zareef Khan, a senior police officer in Bajaur.
The attack left Dr. Rehman and a police official, Ilyas Khan, wounded. The anti-polio program official, who was critically injured, was immediately shifted to the provincial capital of Peshawar.
“A short while ago, we received the tragic news that he had expired,” Khan told Arab News.
Amjad Ali, a spokesman for the polio eradication program in KP, confirmed that Dr. Rehman was brought to Peshawar, but he succumbed to his injuries.
Khan said a case had been lodged against unidentified suspects and police had started investigating the attack in Bajaur, a restive Pakistani tribal district that borders Afghanistan.
The district was once a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, which are separate from but close allies of the Afghan Taliban, before the Pakistani army drove the militants out of the tribal districts in successive operations that began in late 2000s.
In the past, militants, including the Pakistani Taliban, have killed scores of anti-polio vaccinators and their security escorts in the region.
Earlier this month, five policemen were killed and 22 others were wounded after a blast targeted an anti-polio protection team in Mamund village of the same district, according to police. The police contingent was headed out to far-flung areas in the province to protect the vaccinators.
Opposition to inoculation grew in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions after the US Central Intelligence Agency organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad in 2011.
The latest attack comes amid an ongoing nationwide campaign to vaccinate 4.2 million children under the age of five years. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where the disease is still endemic.