Two police officers were killed in Pakistan’s northwestern Bajaur tribal district on Monday while protecting health workers administering polio vaccine to children, a security official said.
Two separate attacks took place in Bajaur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan.
The killings came on the first day of Pakistan’s nationwide campaign to combat rising cases of polio.
“During a polio campaign in the tribal district of Bajaur, two police officers assigned to protect vaccination teams were shot dead by terrorists riding motorcycles in two separate attacks,” a senior Peshawar-based security official told AFP news agency.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned Monday’s attacks and expressed condolences to the families of the slain officers.
Vaccine misinformation is rampant in rural areas
Polio is a highly contagious virus that mainly affects children under five years of age. If caught, the virus can result in lifelong paralysis.
This disease can be easily prevented by vaccination, which can be given orally with a few drops.
Before the first vaccine was developed in 1955, the poliomyelitis virus maimed and killed half a million people each year.
But misinformation about the vaccine has circulated in rural Pakistan and been spread by militants who falsely claim the vaccination campaign is part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children.
More than 200 polio workers and the police officers protecting them have been killed in Pakistan since the 1990s.
Polio is still endemic in Pakistan
The killings in Bajaur came as Pakistan began a week-long vaccination drive in 79 high-risk districts, where officials hope to administer polio drops to more than 19 million children.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only countries in the world where polio is still endemic, but militants have targeted hundreds of police officers and health workers over the past decade as part of a campaign against the Pakistani state.
Pakistan has spent an estimated $10 billion (8.5 billion euros) on polio vaccination programs in the region since 2011.
Despite two decades of challenges including political instability, drone attacks in its tribal areas and conflict in Afghanistan, mass vaccination programs took Pakistan to the brink of polio eradication in 2023, with only six cases of the wild form of the virus remaining.
But the virus is still present and cases are rising again. 73 cases have been reported in 2024, 31 in 2025 and one in 2026 so far.
Edited by: Louis Olofse