A bomb explosion targeting a vehicle carrying polio workers and police officers in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province injured six people on Monday, local police reported. The blast occurred in the South Waziristan district when an explosive device planted along the roadside detonated as the vehicle passed. Among the injured were three polio workers and three police officers, several of whom are in critical condition. Rescue teams and security forces quickly arrived at the scene, transporting the injured to a local hospital and launching a search operation. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
The incident comes just one day after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif launched a nationwide anti-polio campaign aimed at eradicating the disease across Pakistan.
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Vaccination teams, particularly those involved in polio eradication, have faced violent attacks in Pakistan for over a decade. The targeting of polio workers began in earnest after 2011, when the US Central Intelligence Agency used a fake vaccination campaign as part of the operation to locate Osama bin Laden. This led to widespread mistrust of vaccination efforts, particularly in rural and conservative areas, where extremists spread rumors that the vaccinations were part of Western espionage or plots to sterilize Muslim children. Since then, both the Taliban and other armed groups have attacked polio workers, accusing them of collaborating with foreign intelligence agencies. As a result, dozens of health workers and security personnel assigned to protect them have been killed or injured.
In January 2024, a roadside bomb in Peshawar killed five officers guarding polio vaccinators and injured 27 others, while in August 2023, two police officers were killed in an ambush in Quetta. Previous incidents include the killing of a health worker and two policemen in June 2022 in northwest Pakistan, the fatal shooting of a police escort in January 2021, and a roadside bomb attack in February 2020 in Dera Ismail Khan that killed one officer and injured two others. Attacks in earlier years, including bombings and shootings in Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar, and Chaman, have claimed numerous lives. Among the deadliest attacks were the January 2016 Taliban-claimed suicide bombing of a polio vaccination center in Quetta, which killed at least 15 people, and the March 2014 triple roadside bombing that killed 12 polio vaccination team members in the Khyber tribal district.