Morning assault: Polio campaigner slain in hospital

The murdered vaccinator headed the EPI programme in Mattani.

PESHAWAR:

Just a week after a polio campaign supervisor was gunned down in the Ghundai area of Jamrud, assailants on Saturday shot dead another supervisor of an anti-polio drive at his office in Civil Hospital Mattani on the outskirts of Peshawar.

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Health Minister Shaukat Yousafzai confirmed the attack in which two others were injured. “Routine child immunisation was going on in the hospital when the attack took place,” he said.

An administrative official at the hospital said that the incident occurred at around 9:30am, right when a woman with a child walked to the booth for vaccination along with a class-IV hospital employee. The two of them were also injured in the attack.

The official reported that the slain supervisor, Zahir Gul, a resident of Azakhel, was a member of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) in Mattani and the head of the transit team of anti-polio drives and also supervised the vaccination teams in the area.



The woman, Samina Bibi, approached Zahir Gul’s office with her child to have anti-polio drops administered, when a 15-year-old boy barged in and opened fire on them with a pistol and fled the scene. Gul died on the spot. The woman and Naqab Khan, a class-IV employee of the immunisation programme were injured.

The injured were rushed to Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar after being given first aid. The police rushed to the crime scene to investigate.

A senior official of Mattani police told The Express Tribune that it was an incident of target killing. “Yet another official in-charge of the anti-polio team in Mattani had been targeted,” he said, adding that initial investigations revealed the assailant went straight into the room where Gul was administering the vaccine and opened fire. He confirmed that a 9mm pistol had been used. The official ruled out the possibility of enmity or a feud, and added that the killer had targeted only the supervisor. “Personal foes do not kill their victims inside hospitals,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2013.