2015-02-18 08:45
Quetta - Four members of a polio immunisation team have been
found murdered after being kidnapped in southwest Pakistan, officials
said Wednesday.
Local militants had abducted the vaccination
worker, two local tribal policemen and a driver in the Zhob district of
Baluchistan province on Saturday.
Pakistan is one of only three
countries where polio remains endemic. But attempts to eradicate it have
been badly hit by opposition from militants and attacks on immunisation
teams that have now claimed 71 lives since December 2012.
"Security
agencies conducted several operations to recover the polio worker and
other team members and finally found their bodies in the mountains on
Tuesday," a senior local administration official in Zhob, Nazar Muhammad
Khatran, told AFP.
He said it seemed the four men were shot dead on Saturday or Sunday.
A spokesman for the paramilitary Frontier Corps, Manzoor Ahmad, confirmed the incident.
Taliban
militants claim that the polio vaccination drive is a front for
espionage or a conspiracy to sterilise Muslims. They stepped up their
attacks after a Pakistani doctor was recruited by the CIA to take part
in a fake immunisation drive to capture Osama Bin Laden.
Ahmad
said Frontier Corps troops on Wednesday secured the safe release of five
field staff from the Pakistan Telecommunication Company after an
exchange of fire with militants in Zhob district.
They had been abducted last week.
Apart
from attacks on vaccination teams, Baluchistan -- Pakistan's largest
but least developed and most sparsely populated province -- has been
racked for decades by a separatist insurgency that was revived in 2004.
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