UN condemns attack on police van
UN: The gun-and-grenade attack on a police van guarding polio worker in Dera Ismail Khan, in which five officers were reportedly hurt, has been condemned as “despicable” by the UN.
At the regularly scheduled noon briefing at UN Headquarters in New York, Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, responded to a question with, “It’s not the first time we’ve seen attacks on health workers; It’s not the first time we’ve seen attacks on people trying to do polio vaccination in Pakistan and other places in the world.
He added, “Sometimes we’re faced with a situation where you really run out of words, but it is despicable to target and attack people who are going out in communities in extremely challenging circumstances, trying to protect the lives of infants and babies from a preventable disease that is almost wiped out; except for a handful of countries, and that all too often is due to a security situation where people actively work against health workers.” Pakistan is one of the only two countries — the other being Afghanistan — where polio is still prevalent despite relentless vaccination drives.
