Daily Times

PESHAWAR: Gunmen on a motorbike shot dead a senior member of the polio eradication campaign in northwest of the country, police said on Sunday, in the latest attack on immunisation teams by extremists.

Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by militant attacks on inoculation teams that have claimed more than 100 lives since December 2012.

Doctor Zakaullah Khan, a seasoned member of Peshawar’s polio vaccination campaign, was killed late Saturday when gunmen on a motorbike opened fire near his house, a senior police official told AFP.

Imtiaz Ahmad, a provincial spokesman for the immunisation campaign, also confirmed the killing.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter group of the Tehrik-i-Taliban on Sunday claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement, sent to AFP, the group’s spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan vowed to carry out more attacks.

Attacks on polio eradication teams grew after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States (US) organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down al Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

In April 2016, gunmen attacked policemen guarding medical workers administering polio vaccinations in the port city of Karachi, killing seven of them, which temporarily suspended the anti-polio drive in the largest city of the country.

A polio eradication worker was shot and wounded in February and in January a suicide bomber killed 15 people outside a polio eradication centre in Quetta.

Despite the attacks, Pakistan hopes to be removed from the list of polio-endemic countries by 2018 by achieving its goal of no fresh cases for a year. Last year, Pakistan reported 54 of 74 worldwide cases of polio, down drastically from the 306 cases reported in the country the year before, mainly due to expanded immunisation efforts.

As one of the two countries in the world where polio remains a threat to date, the World Health Organisaton (WHO) last year made it mandatory for all Pakistanis travelling abroad to have at least one dose of the anti-polio vaccine.