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Two more polio workers killed in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD — A roadside bomb killed two polio workers in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, in the third such attack this week on workers struggling to immunize children against the crippling disease.

The explosion struck as the two workers, with a UN-backed campaign, were traveling by motorcycle through the Parachinar district, near the border with Afghanistan.

It was the first such attack on health workers in that area, said a senior local official speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity, offering further evidence that a Taliban-led campaign of violence and intimidation against polio workers is spreading across northwestern Pakistan.

Despite an internationally supported campaign to halt polio in Pakistan, infection rates have soared in the past year, coinciding with a wave of militant attacks.

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Some militants accuse polio workers of using vaccination as a cover to spy on behalf of the United States — a claim that has been fueled by the revelation that the CIA used a vaccination drive as cover for the effort to find Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in early 2011.

The violence has badly affected vaccination efforts, which involve tens of thousands of health workers who repeatedly administer cheap oral vaccines to children under 5.

Nine polio workers were killed in a string of attacks across the country in December. On Tuesday, suspected militants fatally shot a police officer who had been escorting female polio workers in the Swabi District, 50 miles east of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

The shooting prompted officials to suspend the campaign in Swabi, but they pressed ahead in other parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the adjoining tribal belt. But it was not certain whether the latest killings were directly related to the polio campaign.

A local official said it was unclear whether the explosion targeted the two workers for their links to the polio campaign or for their religious affiliation.

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