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Police said on Sunday, a gunman on a motorcycle shot and killed a policeman guarding a polio vaccination worker in a rural northwestern part of Pakistan.
Senior official Khalid Suhail said the attack took place in the village of Darbezadi, about 75 kilometers south of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
He said that members of the vaccination team were not injured. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The attack occurred on the third day of a five-day polio vaccination campaign across the province. This is part of a national plan to eradicate this serious disease by the end of 2021. So far this year, Pakistan has not reported new polio cases.
After Nigeria declared free of the virus last year, Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two polio-endemic countries in the world.
Aimar Khan, spokesman for the Provincial Anti-Poliomyelitis Program, said that the goal of the five-day driver program is to vaccinate 6.24 million children under the age of 5 in the province. He said that nearly 30,340 well-trained teams of workers are being vaccinated door-to-door.
Khan said that the safety measures of the vaccination team were strengthened after the attack in the Kohart area on Sunday. Approximately 40,000 police and paramilitary forces were assigned to provide security during the vaccination campaign.
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Pakistani militants often target polio teams and the police assigned to protect them, claiming that the vaccination campaign is a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Last month, a police officer was killed while guarding the polio vaccination team in Peshawar while returning home. A roadside bomb exploded when a police car escorting the vaccination team passed by in the Radha area of ​​South Waziristan. The explosion injured a policeman, but the vaccination team was not injured.
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