The attack is considered to be the worst of its kind against vaccinators if it is proven to be a polio-related act. The family has made it clear that they have no enmity with anyone.
Senior police officials, however, believe the initial evidence collected in the case indicated that the incident was not an attack on the polio worker but was related to some other issue. The officials didn’t disclose the motive for the murder.
Villagers and family members said Salma Farooq, along with her children and spouse, was asleep in her house in Gulozai, located in the limits of the Chamkani Police Station, when eight armed men broke into her house. The gunmen allegedly fastened her spouse and children, including three daughters and two sons, and picked up the woman, who is an LHV at a local Basic Health Unit.
Villagers from Gulozai and nearby villages blocked the Peshawar-Islamabad Motorway for more than an hour on Monday morning to protest the kidnapping of Salma Farooq, the wife of Mohammad Karim. The angry villagers demanded her safe recovery.
However, the police recovered her mutilated body from near the Shah Alam River in Pashto Daaman village a couple of hours after the protesters reopened the road. Police said there were signs of severe torture on her body before she was shot dead.
Despite the police denial, most of the villagers, especially the families of the vaccinators in the nearby towns and all over Peshawar, believed that it was an attack on polio workers. Over 60 people have so far been killed all over the country while several sustained injuries in attacks on polio vaccinators and police and other security personnel guarding them since December 2012. Most of the attacks were carried out in Peshawar.
Around 4,500 policemen in Peshawar and other districts have been guarding the vaccination teams during the weekly immunisation campaigns on Sunday under the Sehat Ka Insaf programme, which is mostly focusing on eradicating the poliovirus.
No comments:
Post a Comment