A Deputy Commissioner (DC) for the district said that on Wednesday, a polio worker in Jacobabad was allegedly kidnapped and sexually assaulted.
DC Jacobabad According to Zahoor Murri, the event happened in Detha village, inside the boundaries of the Moladad police station.
He said, “The victim was taken to James Hospital under strict security after the police arrived at the scene of the incident.”
At the hospital, the polio worker was having a physical examination.
According to DC Murri, “the medicolegal examination would confirm if any abuse took place.”
He continued by saying that the polio worker claimed the two armed suspects had called her under the guise of giving children polio drops.
The deputy commissioner stated, “Both suspects have been identified and operations are underway to arrest them,” with the expectation that the arrests would take place shortly.
Officer and polio worker slain in Bajaur: cops
Meanwhile, during the most recent drive to vaccinate millions of children nationwide, gunmen in Bajaur killed a police officer and a polio worker on Wednesday, according to police.
Senior police official Waqas Rafiq told AFP that “a polio team was returning to the local (health unit) after completing their duties when two unidentified motorcyclists opened fire on them.” He claimed that one police officer and one polio worker had died, and that one more person had been injured.
Two days prior, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for an improvised bomb attack on a polio vaccination team in the same district, resulting in nine casualties. The attack took place in the Bajaur district, near the border with Afghanistan.
The assault on Wednesday took place on the third day of a week-long vaccination campaign intended to vaccinate 30 million children. As a result, a portion of the Bajaur area will now experience a pause.
The only two nations in the world where polio is still widespread despite a reliable vaccine are Pakistan and Afghanistan. For more over ten years, hundreds of police officers and polio workers have been killed by militants.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) reports that there were just eight cases of polio in Pakistan in 2018, a sharp decline from the 20,000 cases reported annually in the early 1990s.
Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Programme reports that there has been a spike in instances once more, with 17 cases reported since January as opposed to just six cases in the previous year.
Police officers are frequently attacked by militants waging a battle against security forces while protecting polio workers who go door-to-door in unstable areas.
Some mountainous border regions of Pakistan still have pockets of people who refuse to get vaccinated against the will of firebrand clerics, conspiracy theories, and false information that the vaccine is against Islam.
