Two police officers protecting polio workers in Pakistan shot dead

What the report says

Gunmen killed two police officers and wounded a third in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province while the officers were escorting teams involved in the country’s polio vaccination campaign, according to Al Jazeera, citing police and AFP. The attack took place on Tuesday after assailants on a motorcycle opened fire on a police vehicle heading toward a nearby village. Police official Ali Rehman Khan said no vaccination workers were in the car at the time.

The shooting came one day after four other officers assigned to protect polio teams were kidnapped in the same province. Al Jazeera reported that the abducted officers had not been found as search efforts continued. No group immediately claimed the attack, though the report noted that the Pakistan Taliban, or TTP, and other armed groups have carried out similar violence in the past, often driven by false claims that polio campaigns are part of a plot to sterilize children.

The violence unfolded as Pakistan launched a targeted vaccination drive aimed at reaching nearly 24 million children across 97 high-risk districts. Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries where wild poliovirus is still endemic. Al Jazeera also reported that Pakistan registered its eighth polio case of the year on the same day, in a 13-month-old girl from Khyber district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province most affected by the disease.