MULTAN: Pakistani police arrested the key suspect in the gang rape of a woman polio worker who was assaulted by three men during last week’s vaccination campaign, officials said Wednesday. Two other suspects are still at large.
The assault on Thursday in Jacobabad, a district in the southern Sindh province, was one in a spate of attacks targeting polio vaccination teams going door to door in the campaign across Pakistan.
The woman who was attacked had alerted the authorities, saying she was raped by three men after going into a house in Jacobabad to administer polio drops to the children there, local police official Mohammad Saifal said.
The suspect, identified as Ahmad Jakhrani, was arrested overnight, Saifal added.
Police are still seeking the arrest of the two other men, accused of taking turns to assault the woman, Saifal said. A local police chief was fired for negligence following the attack, for failing to provide the polio worker with adequate security.
The attack shocked many Pakistanis as such sexual assaults are rare, though women polio workers have complained of harassment in the past during the campaigns. The provincial government in Sindh has said it would fully investigate the case.
Police also detained the husband of the attacked woman for kicking her out of their home and threatening to kill her after the assault over allegedly tarnishing the family’s honor by being raped.
So-called honor killings, in which women and girls are slain by their own relatives for allegedly dishonoring the family’s reputation, are still common in Pakistan.
Saifal also said police have been deployed to the house where the woman was now staying with her relatives for her protection.
Anti-polio campaigns in Pakistan are regularly marred by violence. Militants often target polio vaccination teams and police assigned to protect them, falsely claiming that the campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Since January, Pakistan has reported 17 new cases of polio, jeopardizing decades of efforts to eliminate the potentially fatal, paralyzing disease from the country. Polio often strikes children under age 5 and typically spreads through contaminated water.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries in which the spread of polio has never been stopped. Pakistan’s government is planning another polio vaccination drive in October.

WARSAW: Soldiers and volunteers in southwestern Poland were laying sandbags Wednesday near swollen rivers in the region of Wroclaw as they worked to safeguard homes and businesses after days of flooding across Central Europe.
Several Central European nations have been hit by severe flooding, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania as a result of a low pressure system that began dumping record rainfall in the region last Thursday.
Authorities have reported 23 deaths so far, with seven each in Poland and Romania, five in Austria and four in the Czech Republic.
The combination of floods in Central Europe and deadly wildfires in Portugal are joint proof of a “climate breakdown” that will become the norm unless drastic action is taken, the European Union’s head office said Wednesday.
The fourth death in the Czech Republic was reported Wednesday, when police said they found the body of a 70-year-old woman who was swept away by waters on Sunday in the town of Kobyla nad Vidnavkou near the town of Jesenik, located in the badly hit northeast.
The weather has improved, with warm and sunny conditions in the Czech Republic, Poland and elsewhere. Water levels were falling in some places, allowing authorities and residents to clean up debris.
Firefighters in Poland were pumping water out of flooded streets and basements. And in Romania, about 1,000 firefighters were working across the country to clean up severely affected areas, the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations said Wednesday in a Facebook post.
But some areas are still facing a threat, particularly in southwestern Poland.
Soldiers and residents in Marcinkowice, near Wroclaw, were laying sandbags near a bridge over the Olawa River, whose waters flow into the Oder, the major river that rises in the Oder Mountains in the Czech Republic and runs north through Poland to Germany.
The community leader of the town of Olawa, Artur Piotrowski, described the situation as difficult. He told the Polish state news agency PAP that two villages in a low-lying area have been flooded since Monday and residents refused to evacuate.
Thousands of Polish soldiers were in action. Some evacuated people and animals — including dogs and horses — from flood-affected areas and distributed food and drinking water. The army also posted on X on Wednesday that it set up a field hospital in the town of Nysa after patients in a hospital there had to be evacuated earlier this week.
Experts have been preparing for flood threats due to the cresting Oder River in Opole, a city of some 130,000 residents, and Wroclaw, home to about 640,000 residents, which suffered disastrous flooding in 1997.