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Afghanistan: opposition movement denies involvement in killing of polio vaccinators

2022-03-13T10:11:15.425Z


The National Resistance Front (FNR) on Sunday denied any involvement in the murder of seven members of polio vaccination teams...


The National Resistance Front (FNR) on Sunday denied any involvement in the murder of seven members of polio vaccination teams in late February in northern Afghanistan, as accused by the police.

On Saturday, Afghan police announced that they had arrested two men accused of killing seven polio vaccinators on February 24 in the northern province of Kunduz.

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The arrested suspects "

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

", and "

having been paid

" to carry out the assassinations, had declared to AFP provincial police spokesman Qari Obaidullah Abedi.

This is clearly Taliban propaganda against the FNR

,” Ali Maisam Nazary, spokesman for the opposition movement, reacted to AFP on Sunday.

The National Resistance Front condemns the perpetrators of this attack and we firmly believe that it was carried out by the Taliban or one of their terrorist accomplices

,” he added.

Vaccine defiance

The seven vaccination team members had been killed in three separate attacks in Kunduz province.

An eighth was killed the same day in the neighboring province of Takhar.

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.

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 .

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.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-03-13

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