Two people, one a police officer, have been killed
by a bomb apparently targeting anti-polio
campaigners in Pakistan, say police.
The blast struck a van near a hospital in Budh Bher
suburb of the north-western city of Peshawar.
A death toll of six was earlier given but corrected by
police.
Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio
remains endemic, due in part due to militant resistance
to polio mass vaccination campaigns.
Militants have attacked and killed health workers and
banned immunisation teams from some areas, forcing
hundreds of thousands of children to miss vaccinations.
The two killed in Monday's attack comprised one
police officer and a member of a local peace
committee, riding in a van as part of an anti-polio
campaign, said police officials.
Several other people are reported to have been injured.
Reports said many were police, but an injured young
girl was also pictured in images from the scene.
The team inside the van was supposed to be
accompanying the health workers administering polio
vaccines in order to protect them, reports said.
One of them, Rasheed Khan, told Reuters news agency:
"I was with the polio team.
"As soon as we reached the front of the hospital... there
was a blast right in front of the gate.
We were around 12 or 13 people."
Police had earlier reported a higher toll but corrected
this upon confirmation from medical sources.
Pictures from the scene showed a young girl injured in
the blast
The explosive device was reported to have been
detonated remotely.
The Pakistani news website Dawn quoted police as
saying another, bigger, bomb had been found in the
vicinity of the first one and the Bomb Disposal Squad
called in to defuse it.
A fake hepatitis vaccination campaign, run covertly by
the CIA, helped to locate al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin
Laden in 2011. He was then killed in an operation by
US Navy Seals.
A rising tide of violence has hindered new Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif's overtures to end the militant
insurgency through peace talks with the Taliban.
Peshawar has been particularly hard hit. In just over
two weeks, it has suffered four attacks which between
them left more than 150 people dead.
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