Islamabad, Jan 9 (EFE).- At least two police officers were killed and two others wounded in an attack on a polio vaccination team in Pakistan on Tuesday.<\/p>
The attack comes a day after five people were killed when a bomb hit a police truck which was transporting medical workers to a local health center where they were due to escort polio eradication teams.<\/p>
Both attacks occurred in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).<\/p>
\u201cAt 14:15, two terrorists riding a motorcycle opened fire on a police team protecting polio workers” in KP, Ghulam Khan, an officer at Bannu police station, told EFE.<\/p>
Khan said two members of the security forces were injured, while the team of vaccinators were able to escape unharmed.<\/p>
Police personnel chased the assailants to a nearby house under construction and, according to Khan, a gunfight broke out in which two members of the security forces were killed.<\/p>
“The gunfight between security forces and terrorists continues,” he said.<\/p>
Efforts to eradicate polio have been hampered for years by a number of factors in Pakistan, one of only two countries in the world with Afghanistan where the virus is still present.<\/p>
Many conservative parents in the country are wary of vaccination drives due to distrust in the government and the belief that vaccines are anti-Islamic or are a Western plot to sterilize their children.<\/p>
The issue was further complicated when the US conducted a fake vaccination campaign as part of its hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US special forces in 2011 in Pakistan.<\/p>
The Pakistani government, which reported six cases in 2023 and 20 in 2022, launched a polio campaign to inoculate 44.3 million children on Monday. EFE<\/p>
aa-daa\/ks<\/p>
<\/p>
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"