By Jibran Ahmed
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 7 (Reuters) – A bomb that exploded
near a polio vaccination team in the volatile northwestern
Pakistani city of Peshawar on Monday killed at least two people,
and possibly as many as six, police said, the latest in a string
of attacks against health workers.
Islamist violence has been on the rise in Pakistan,
undermining Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s efforts to tame the
insurgency by opening peace talks with the Taliban.
Peshawar has borne the brunt of much of that violence, with
the frontier city near the Afghan border hit by at least four
attacks that killed scores in the past month.
Monday’s blast appeared to target police who were assigned
to protect the vaccination team. Health workers have been
attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccination as a
Western plot to sterilize Muslims.
Two people were killed and around 20 people wounded, said
Peshawar police official Najeeb ur-Rehman. Other police reports
suggested up to six people were killed.
The bomb was placed directly outside a clinic in
Sulemankhen, on the outskirts of the provincial capital of
Peshawar, Rehman said.
Gunmen killed two female polio health workers in the same
area earlier this year. Similar attacks have been staged
elsewhere in Pakistan and also in Nigeria, where Islamist gunmen
killed nine health workers in February.
Such attacks hamper efforts by global health organisations
to eradicate polio, a virus that can cause irreversible
paralysis within hours of infection. Polio remains endemic in
only three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
A small but vocal minority of religious leaders in those
countries accuse the West of using the vaccination campaign to
cover up a variety of anti-Islam plots.
Eight new cases of polio were reported in Pakistan last
week, according to the Global Eradication Initiative.
Violence in Pakistan’s often lawless northwest has shown few
signs of abating despite efforts to open talks with separate
Taliban groups in Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan.
A car bomb killed 42 people in an ancient market in Peshawar
on Sept. 29, a week after an attack by a Taliban faction on
Peshawar’s Anglican church killed about 80 people.
(Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Paul Tait)
