Two cops on polio duty martyred

Two more policemen have been gunned down in Tank district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) while they were on polio security duty.

District Police Officer (DPO) Tank Waqar Khan told The Express Tribune that the attack took place in the Kacha Gara area of the district on Tuesday.

“The attack took place in Kacha Gara area where two constables of police were targeted by militants who managed to escape after committing the crime,” he said, adding that both the constables Nisar and Pir Rehman died on the spot.

It is worth mentioning here that the 10-day anti-polio vaccination campaign was launched on August 15 in the province for which a large number of policemen had been deployed across the Tank district too like the rest of the province to provide security to vaccinators.

A large contingent of police was sent to the area soon after which carried out a door to door search, an operation supervised personally by the DPO.

The attackers, however, managed to escape after committing the crime.

“We are after the attackers and sooner or later police will reach them,” said the DPO, adding that security has been further enhanced for the vaccination campaign.

Around 273 teams have been deployed in the district as part of polio immunization drive and 74,848 children will be vaccinated in Tank.

For the security of the vaccination teams, 1,031 policemen have been deployed.

Tank is a district which is quite notorious for attacks at police. Several policemen have been targeted while protecting vaccination teams in recent past.

The last rites of the slain policemen were offered at DPO office and attended by high-ranking police and security officials.

Later the coffins were sent to the martyrs’ ancestral towns for burial.

The law and order situation has deteriorated quickly across K-P after the fall of Kabul to Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan last August who released all Pakistani militants from prisons soon after taking over.

Police and security forces are the main target of the vicious assaults. The general public has also been bearing the brunt as traders are constantly receiving extortion calls from militants who use Afghan SIMs.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 17^th, 2022.