Khyber News

KARACHI: Unidentified armed gunmen opened fire at a UN vehicle in Sohrab Goth area injuring a foreign doctor and his driver here on Tuesday. 

The doctor working on a polio immunization campaign was on a visit to an Afghan colony in Sohrab Goth area when gunslingers riding a motorcycle shot at the vehicle bursting its tires first and targeting those inside of the car afterwards. 

The shooting happened in the Soharb Goth neighbourhood of eastern Karachi on the second day of a widely publicized polio vaccination campaign.

According to police sources, the concerned UN department did not inform of such a field trip, adding that the police department was kept unaware of it. After the incident, heavy police contingents arrived at the scene and initiated a search operation.  

Attacks on foreigners are rare in Karachi, but human rights activists say ethnic, sectarian and politically-linked violence has killed at least 740 people in the city so far this year alone.

“A WHO vehicle was fired upon with gunshots. One international staff and one local driver were injured in the incident,” Maryam Yunus, spokeswoman for the United Nations’ World Health Organisation, told a foreign news agency. 

She said the doctor from Ghana and the Pakistani doctor had been transferred to a private hospital where their condition was stable.

“They are out of danger,” Yunus said.

Local police station chief Mohammad Sultan said the doctor had been working in the neighbourhood for about three months, where he was vaccinating against polio.

“He was going there when firing took place,” Sultan said.

Police had initially said that the doctor was critically wounded.

Local television channels broadcast footage of bullet holes in the unmarked, white double-cabin pick-up vehicle. – Agencies