A powerful blast occurred near the office of the head unit of anti-polio campaign in Quetta’s Satellite Town area on Wednesday morning, killing at least 14 people and injuring 10 further.
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The bomb blew up a police van that had just arrived at the centre to provide an escort for workers in a drive to immunise all children under five years in Balochistan. The suicide bombing in Quetta coincided with an attack on Pakistan’s consulate in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, in which seven people were killed and 11 injured.
No group has made claim to the attack, but the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda has been linked to it after previous acts against polio centers and on health workers.
Jundallah spokesman Ahmad Marwat told CNN via text that this group was responsible and that it “will always target polio teams”.
Militants fight polio vaccination, saying this is a Western conspiracy to sterilise Pakistani youngsters.
The bombing happened outside the polio center shortly before vaccination teams were due to be dispatched to local neighborhoods as part of a three-day immunization campaign, Shah said. Health officials said 52 new polio cases were reported in 2015, compared to 306 cases a year earlier. “We won’t allow the nefarious designs of the terrorists to succeed, we will eliminate polio”, he said.
People transfer an injured policeman to a hospital in southwest Pakistan’s Quetta, Jan. 13, 2016.
Officials were still figuring out whether the blast had been caused by a roadside bomb or a suicide bomber. The Khurasan group of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan also claimed credit for the attack in a statement emailed to journalists by its purported spokesman Mohammad Khorasani.
The ongoing anti-polio campaign in the district was halted for an hour after the attack but was resumed later. Meanwhile, the injured were shifted to the civil hospital in Quetta.
Pakistan is one of only two countries where polio, a crippling childhood disease, remains endemic.
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Apart from attacks on vaccination teams, Balochistan has been racked for decades by a separatist insurgency that was revived in 2004.
