AP and Dawn both reported the Mohmand shooting, citing local police; Dawn identified the officers. The attackers’ identity and any organizational responsibility were not established in the reports reviewed. AP and Dawn reported an official target of about 24 million children in 97 districts; the government campaign notice was not accessible during this check. WHO’s August assessment supplies the endemic-status and access context. The current campaign photograph offered by AP required licensing and was not reused. Both selected CDC Global photographs are archive context only: vaccination activity in Punjab in January and February 2015. They do not depict the November 2026 attack or campaign; original files and CC BY 2.0 terms are linked, and derivatives were resized without cropping.
An ambush en route to a vaccine team
Two police officers assigned to protect Pakistan’s polio vaccination teams were killed and a third was wounded in a gun attack in Mohmand district on Tuesday, police said. The officers were travelling to join a team preparing to vaccinate children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a northwestern province bordering Afghanistan.
Dawn reported that the officers were Constables Zahoor Khan and Arbai Khan. Police told the newspaper the attack occurred near a checkpoint in Pindiali tehsil. The attackers fled, the Associated Press reported, and no group had claimed responsibility in the accounts reviewed.
A campaign across 97 selected districts
The shooting came as Pakistan’s latest sub-national vaccination drive targets about 24 million children across 97 selected districts, according to officials cited by AP and Dawn. The campaign focuses on selected areas rather than running in every district at once, using oral polio vaccine drops to close immunity gaps.
Police said the officers were on their way to provide security for vaccinators. Neither AP nor Dawn reported that vaccine workers were injured in the shooting; the reports did not establish whether the attack changed operations elsewhere in the district.
Insecurity remains a barrier to eradication
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where wild poliovirus remains endemic, the World Health Organization said in an August assessment. WHO reported that about 250,000 children in South Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had not been reached, primarily because insecurity and access constraints made vaccination difficult. That estimate predates the November campaign and is not a measure of its current coverage.
The attack adds to the security risks facing teams and their escorts, but does not by itself show that the campaign has been interrupted. Officials have not publicly identified the attackers in the reports reviewed.
Sources
3 references
- Associated Press2 Pakistani police officers guarding polio workers killed in drive-by shootingReports the Mohmand attack, injury to a third officer, the separate Tank abductions, and the 24-million-child campaign, citing police and the provincial governor. · 2026-11-03
- Dawn2 policemen martyred, 1 injured in attack en route to polio duty in KP’s MohmandLocal reporting quoting the Mohmand deputy superintendent of police, identifying the officers, and describing the four Tank abductions and 97-district campaign. · 2026-11-03
- World Health OrganizationStatement of the Forty-fifth Meeting of the Polio IHR Emergency CommitteePrimary epidemiological context: Pakistan and Afghanistan remain wild-polio endemic; the committee describes insecurity and access constraints affecting reach in South Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. · 2026-08-25
