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 suspectsadmitted 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 “to have been paidto carry out the killings, provincial police spokesman Qari Obaidullah Abedi told AFP.
“This is clearly Taliban propaganda against the FNR“Reacted Sunday to AFP Ali Maisam Nazary, spokesperson for the opposition movement. “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 struggle after the return to power of the Taliban 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.