Militant gunned down in attack on police accompanying polio vaccination team in northwest Pak

Peshawar, Apr 21 (PTI) A militant was gunned down by police that was accompanying a polio vaccination team that came under attack in northwest Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Monday.
     According to a statement issued by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IGP’s office, “unidentified terrorists attacked the station house officer (SHO) of the Azam Warsak Police Station and a team of cops in the Kalosha area in South Waziristan”. “The SHO and the police team were on polio duty,” it added.
     The statement said that “one terrorist was killed in an exchange of fire” that lasted for about 30 minutes. The remaining terrorists fled the scene.
     The authorities recovered a sub-machine gun, a rocket launcher and two motorcycles from the assailants.
     As per the statement, the slain terrorist was identified as “Afnan, who was carrying two identity cards, three ATM cards and a smartphone”.
     It added that one of the recovered cards belonged to the terrorist, but the other one belonged to a police constable, who was killed in an attack before Eid-ul Fitr.
     Militant violence and security operations intensified in the country in March, with the number of militant attacks surpassing 100 for the first time since November 2014, according to a report by the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies.
     Pakistan ranked second in the Global Terrorism Index 2025, with the number of deaths in terrorist attacks rising by 45 per cent over the past year to 1,081.
     Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Health Minister Mustafa Kamal on Monday highlighted the urgent need for action to combat polio and said environmental samples detected the presence of the poliovirus in all districts of Karachi.
     The minister’s statement comes a day after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday launched a seven-day nationwide anti-polio campaign aimed at inoculating millions of children under the age of five, Geo News reported.
     Kamal said over 44,000 families, with 34,000 in Karachi alone, refused to have their children vaccinated during the previous anti-polio campaign.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)