Afghan police announced on Saturday that they had arrested two members of an opposition movement to the Taliban accused of killing seven members of polio vaccination teams in late February in northern Afghanistan.
"The two men arrested admitted to being the perpetrators of these crimes and declared that they had killed the vaccinators on the orders of their leaders of the National Resistance Front" (FNR), spokesman Qari Obaidullah Abedi told AFP. of the police of the province of Kunduz (North).
By February 24, all seven vaccination team members had been killed in three separate attacks in Kunduz province, and an eighth in neighboring Takhar province.
The FNR is led by Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary commander Massoud, assassinated in 2001 by Al-Qaeda, who promised to "continue" the fight after the Taliban returned to power in mid-August.
The last pocket of resistance of the FNR, the Panchir valley, north of Kabul, was taken by the Islamists at the end of September.
The movement has not been very active since.
The police spokesman added that the two men arrested said they "were paid" to kill the vaccinators.
The FNR was not immediately reachable to comment on these accusations.
Polio teams were frequent targets of attack in Afghanistan, until the Taliban took power last August, when they gave the UN their approval for vaccination campaigns.
Vaccination faces lingering suspicion in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, encouraged by conservative clerics who sometimes accuse it of covering up espionage operations or being a tool in a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children .
“We are appalled by the brutality of these murders,” said Ramiz Alakbarov, the deputy special representative of the UN in the country, after the assassinations, calling for the culprits to be tried.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries in the world where poliomyelitis, a highly contagious disease that can cause irreversible paralysis within hours, remains endemic, in particular because of mistrust in vaccination.
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