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Unidentified gunmen shot and killed on Monday a police officer working on Pakistan‘s first polio vaccination drive of the year, police said.
Pakistan has deployed thousands of police officers to protect health workers posted to go house-to-house to inoculate children and are targeted by militants who falsely claim the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize young ones.
Local official Jamshed Khan said the police officer was killed in Jamrud, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif denounced the attack in a statement, vowing to continue the campaign to “eliminate polio in the country.”
The campaign that began Monday aims to vaccinate 44.2 million children younger than 5 and will continue through next Sunday. Ayesha Raza Farooq, the prime minister’s adviser for polio eradication, urged parents to cooperate with the polio workers to protect their children from the disease.
More than 200 polio workers and police assigned for their protection have been killed in Pakistan since the 1990s, according to health officials and authorities. In December, a roadside bomb exploded near a vehicle carrying police officers assigned to protect polio workers in the restive northwest, killing three officers and wounding two others.
Though militant groups have stopped claiming attacks on polio workers and police escorting them, authorities say Pakistani Taliban and other breakaway factions of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, have been behind such attacks. While the TTP is an ally of the Afghan Taliban who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, it’s a separate group.
Polio is an infection caused by a virus that mostly affects children under 5. Most children infected with polio don’t have any symptoms, but it can cause fever, headaches, vomiting and stiffness of the spine. In severe cases, polio can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis within hours, according to the World Health Organization.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two countries where the virus has never been stopped. Pakistan reported one case in January and had 77 cases last year. Afghanistan had 23 cases in 2024, according to WHO data.
Pakistan wants both countries to launch vaccination campaigns simultaneously to eradicate the disease. The Afghan Taliban in September suspended house-to-house polio vaccination campaigns, forcing parents to take children to designated places to inoculate their children.
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Associated Press writer Riaz Khan contributed to this story from Peshawar, Pakistan.
