POLIO SITE COMES UNDER ATTACK
Police acting as guards are the apparent target in the latest strike against Pakistan vaccination program.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A bomb exploded near a government health center Monday in northwestern Pakistan as anti-polio kits were being distributed, killing two people and wounding at least 12, Pakistani officials said.
The explosion in a suburb of Peshawar, the capital of restive Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province near the Afghan border, was apparently detonated by remote control. It was the latest of several attacks on polio workers in Pakistan.
A police officer and a volunteer peace committee member were killed in the blast, which appeared to target police assigned to protect vaccinators shortly before they headed into nearby neighborhoods to administer the anti-polio vaccine, authorities said. The wounded — seven police officers and five civilians — were taken to Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar’s largest.
“The police were the target,” said Najeeb-ur-Rehman Bagvi, a senior police officer.
Dr. Kalim Ullah Khan, assistant director of KhyberPakhtunkhwa’s immunization program, said that Monday was the final day of a three-day vaccination campaign involving about 10,000 children. That day’s immunizations were put on hold temporarily because of the killings.
“There’s a lot of fear everywhere,” Khan said.
Pakistan is one of only three countries, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, where polio is still consid- ered endemic.
Eight new cases of the wild polio virus were reported here last week, one from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and seven from the neighboring Federally Administered Tribal Areas, bringing the total number of cases this year to 36, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a public-private health program.
No one took immediate responsibility for the attack, although the Taliban is suspected.
Efforts to stem polio, long eradicated in the Americas, have been hampered by attacks on healthcare workers after the Taliban condemned vaccination as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims.
Distrust of the West stems in part from the CIA’s use of a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in 2011 as part of an effort to obtain DNA evidence from the Abbottabad residence of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was then killed in a raid mounted by U.S. Navy SEALs.
“I’m sure the CIA [hepatitis] operation set things back,” said Dr. Syed Asad Ali, a pediatrics and child health professor with Karachi’s Aga Khan University. “But I also feel the real target isn’t so much polio as the international press the militants get when they attack polio workers. They’ve realized if you want to be in the news, it’s a good way to do it.”
The bomb used Monday reportedly was planted near the main gate of the health center compound in the Peshawar suburb of Suleman Khel and detonated when police assembled to protect the vaccinators.
Most health workers reportedly were spared because they were inside a building at the time.
Hameed Ullah, a Suleman Khel resident who witnessed the attack, said a second bomb was found and defused outside the health center before it exploded. Local media said the second bomb contained about 17 pounds of explosives, compared with 12 pounds in the first, and that both were fitted with remote-controlled detonators.