Two police officers guarding polio teams shot dead in Mohmand as four linked to vaccination drive abducted in Tank
Gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead two police officers travelling to guard polio vaccination teams in Mohmand district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a day after four people linked to the vaccination effort were abducted in Tank, during a nationwide campaign aiming to reach about 24 million children.
Two police officers assigned to protect polio vaccination teams have been shot dead in northwestern Pakistan, in the latest deadly attack on the people who keep the country’s immunisation drive running in some of its most difficult districts.
The attack took place on Tuesday in Mohmand district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a rugged border district next to Afghanistan, as the officers were travelling to a nearby village to take up their posts with vaccination teams. Gunmen travelling on a motorcycle opened fire on their police vehicle, killing two officers on the spot and wounding a third.
Police said the officers were on their way to guard health workers going door to door, and that no vaccination staff were in the police vehicle at the time of the shooting. The wounded officer was taken to hospital, and the bodies of the two officers who were killed were moved to the district headquarters hospital in Ghalanai.
No group had claimed responsibility for the shooting in the hours after it happened. Similar attacks in the past have regularly been blamed on the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and affiliated armed groups, which have long targeted polio teams and the police officers who protect them, falsely claiming that vaccination campaigns are part of a Western conspiracy to sterilise children.
The Mohmand shooting came a day after a separate incident in Tank, another district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in which four people linked to the polio effort were abducted, according to a statement from provincial Governor Faisal Karim Kundi cited in reporting of the incidents. The two episodes together underlined how quickly a vaccination round can turn into a security crisis for the workers involved.
Both incidents fell in the middle of a nationwide polio campaign aiming to vaccinate nearly 24 million children under the age of five across 97 high-risk districts. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone, a synchronised drive was targeting millions of children across more than two dozen districts, with teams working door to door in areas where health workers often cannot move without an armed escort.
The campaign also came just after health authorities confirmed Pakistan’s eighth polio case of 2026, involving a 13-month-old girl from Khyber district. Each new case is a reminder of how close the virus remains to spreading again in communities where coverage slips, even for a single round.
Security forces were deployed across parts of the northwest after the attacks, and search operations were launched in the surrounding border areas as police hunted the gunmen, who fled the scene. Officials have not reported any arrests in connection with the Mohmand shooting, and the fate of the people abducted in Tank remained unclear in initial reporting.
The pattern is a long and grim one. Reporting citing the South Asia Terrorism Portal put the number of attacks targeting polio workers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since 2020 at more than 45, with deaths, injuries and abductions among both health workers and their guards. That history is why police protection is now treated as a routine part of a vaccination round rather than an exception.
An editorial in a Pakistani newspaper on Wednesday warned that violence against vaccination teams undermines the whole eradication effort, not just a single round. For the campaign to succeed, it argued, the workers who carry the vaccine door to door must be able to do their jobs without fear — a test that the events in Mohmand and Tank showed Pakistan is still failing.
What happens next will depend on whether the security response can restore confidence quickly enough for the current round to finish its work. If teams are forced to delay or skip areas, children there will remain unprotected, and the virus will have another opening. If the round completes despite the attacks, it will be because the vaccinators and their guards kept going in the face of a threat that has already cost two more lives.
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