Monitoring Desk
NEW YORK: The gun-and-grenade attack on a police van guarding a polio worker in Dera Ismail Khan, a district of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, has been condemned as “despicable” by the UN on Thursday.
UN SG spokesman
Five policemen were reportedly wounded in the incident. The United Nations (UN) Secretary General’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric said while responding to a question at a briefing at UN Headquarters in New York that it is not the first time that we have seen attacks on health workers; It’s not the first time we have seen attacks on people busy in polio vaccination in Pakistan and other places in the world.
He continued saying that sometimes they are faced with a situation where they run out of words, but it is abhorrent to target and attack people who are reaching out communities in incredibly difficult circumstances and protecting the lives of infants and babies from a preventable disease that is almost completely eradicated, except for a handful of countries.
Pakistan is one of only 2 countries, the other being Afghanistan, where polio is still a problem despite constant vaccination campaigns.
