PESHAWAR, November 3 — Suspected militants riding a motorcycle shot and killed two police officers assigned to protect polio workers during a door-to-door vaccination campaign in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, officials said. The drive-by shooting in Mohmand, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that borders Afghanistan, also left a third officer wounded, the Associated Press reported.
Source: Associated Press
The police officers were travelling to a nearby village to guard vaccination teams when they came under fire, police officer Ayaz Khan told AP. The attackers fled the scene and no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Pakistani media reported the shooting took place in the Tamanzai area, within the jurisdiction of the Pandiali police station; Mohmand's district police officer was named in local reports as Raza Muhammad Khan. Local outlets published differing names for the fallen constables, so Awaaz Punjab is not printing the names until they are confirmed in a single official police statement.
In Islamabad, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said the attack was 'intolerable' and offered condolences to the families of the killed officers, AP reported. President Asif Ali Zardari also strongly condemned the firing on police deployed to safeguard the polio team in Pindiali tehsil and paid tribute to the officers, Pakistan's state-run APP news agency reported. A search operation was under way in the area, police said.
Second day of a 97-district campaign — and four workers kidnapped in Tank
The attack came on the second day of a sub-national polio vaccination campaign that began on November 2 and runs to November 8 across 97 districts, aiming to reach around 24 million children, according to Pakistan's National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) figures carried by Pakistani media. (Yaani: about 2.4 crore children are being targeted in this single campaign round.) In a second incident, Pakistani media reported that four members of a polio vaccination team were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in the Tank district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi condemned the abduction and called for urgent action to secure their release. Whether the four workers had been recovered had not been reported by Tuesday afternoon.
Source: IANS
BACKGROUND: Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where wild poliovirus remains endemic, according to the World Health Organization. Pakistan reported its eighth polio case of 2026 on Sunday, from the Khyber district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the NEOC said. The Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups regularly target anti-polio drives and the police protecting health workers, falsely claiming the vaccination campaigns are part of a Western conspiracy to sterilise children, AP reported. On September 22, two police personnel guarding a polio team were also killed by armed assailants in the Noshki district of Balochistan province.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: Police say a search operation is under way in Mohmand, and there was no official word by Tuesday afternoon that the vaccination campaign had been suspended in Mohmand or Tank. Campaigns in the region are routinely paused in specific localities after attacks and resumed under heavier guard; whether that happens here, and whether the four kidnapped workers in Tank are recovered, will decide how much of the 97-district round is completed on schedule.