This is the latest in a string of deadly attacks to hit the Peshawar area in recent weeks
Two people, one a police officer, have been killed by a bomb which went off near anti-polio campaigners in Pakistan, say police.
The blast struck a van near a hospital in Budh Bher suburb of the north-western city of Peshawar.
A death toll of six was given earlier but later corrected by police.
Pakistan
is one of only three countries where polio remains endemic, due in part
to militant resistance to polio mass vaccination campaigns.
Militants
have attacked and killed health workers and banned immunisation teams
from some areas, forcing hundreds of thousands of children to miss
vaccinations.
The
other person killed in Monday's attack was a member of a local "peace
committee", who opposed the Taliban, and was riding in a van as part of
the anti-polio campaign, said police officials.
The
team inside the van was supposed to be accompanying the health workers
administering polio vaccines in order to protect them, reports said.
One
of them, Rasheed Khan, told Reuters news agency: "I was with the polio
team. As soon as we reached the front of the hospital... there was a
blast right in front of the gate.
"We were around 12 or 13 people."
Police had earlier reported a higher toll but corrected this upon confirmation from medical sources.
Pictures from the scene showed a young girl injured in the blast
The explosive device was reported to have been detonated remotely.
The Pakistani news website Dawn quoted police as saying another, bigger, bomb had been found in the vicinity of the first one and the bomb disposal squad called in to defuse it.
Pakistan's
high commissioner to the UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, said the object of
such attacks was to gain worldwide publicity "and make the world afraid
of coming to Pakistan's assistance when we need... a lot of assistance".
A
fake hepatitis vaccination campaign, run covertly by the CIA, helped to
locate al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011. He was then killed in
an operation by US Navy Seals.
The Taliban accuse health workers of working as US spies and allege that the polio vaccine makes children sterile.
A
rising tide of violence has hindered new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's
overtures to end the militant insurgency through peace talks with the
Taliban.
Peshawar
has been particularly hard hit. In just over two weeks, it has suffered
four attacks which between them left more than 150 people dead.
0 comments:
Post a Comment