GUNMEN have shot dead five women working on UN-backed polio vaccination efforts in two different Pakistani cities, officials say, a major setback for a campaign that international health officials consider vital to contain the crippling disease but which Taliban insurgents say is a cover for espionage.
Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is endemic. Militants however accuse health workers of acting as spies for the US and claim the vaccine makes children sterile. Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the US stops drone strikes in the country.
Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake vaccination program to help the CIA track down al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest.
The Taliban have targeted previous anti-polio campaigns, but this has been a particularly deadly week. The government is in the middle of a three-day vaccination drive targeting high risk areas of the country as part of an effort to immunise millions of children under the age of five.
The women who were killed on Tuesday - three of whom were teenagers - were all shot in the head at close range. Four of them were gunned down in the southern port city of Karachi, and the fifth in a village outside the northwest city of Peshawar. Two men who were working alongside the women were also critically wounded in Karachi.
The attacks in Karachi were well-coordinated and occurred within 15 minutes in three different areas of the city that are far apart, said police spokesman Imran Shoukat. In each case, the gunmen used nine millimetre pistols. Two of the women were teenagers, aged 18 and 19, and the other two were in their 40s, he said.
Two of the women were killed while they were in a house giving children polio drops, said Shoukat. The other two were travelling between houses when they were attacked, he said.
On Monday another person working on the anti-polio campaign, a male volunteer, was gunned down in Karachi. Taliban militants also killed three soldiers in an ambush of an army convoy escorting a vaccination team in the northwest.
Officials in Karachi responded to the attacks by suspending the vaccination campaign in the city, said Sagheer Ahmed, the health minister for surrounding Sindh province. The campaign started on Monday and was supposed to run until Wednesday, he said.
Immunisation was suspended in Karachi in July as well after a local volunteer was shot to death and two UN staff were wounded.
Janbaz Afridi, a senior health official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the fifth woman was killed, said the shootings would not stop the local government from continuing its vaccination program in the province and the neighbouring tribal region, the main sanctuary for Taliban militants in the country.
"These incidents are depressing and may cause difficulties in the anti-polio drive, but people should not lose heart," said Afridi. "The government is very serious, and we are determined to eliminate polio despite all odds and difficult conditions."
Also on Tuesday, two men on a motorcycle hurled hand grenades at the main gate of an army recruiting centre in the northwestern town of Risalpur, wounding 10 people, including civilians and security personnel, said senior police official Ghulam Mohammed.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, the latest in a string of assaults in recent days that illustrate the continued challenge Pakistan faces from militants despite multiple military operations against the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters.
