Polio vaccinators' killing Nigeria - Three journalists and a former boss of Nigeria's northern Kano state censorship board have been arrested by the police for allegedly inciting Friday's killing of nine polio vaccinators in the state.
The local Leadership newspaper reported Tuesday that the journalists, all staffers of the 'Wazobia FM' in the state, and the ex-government official appeared on a programme at the station, during which they discussed the perception in some quarters in the predominantly-Muslim north that polio vaccines could trigger infertility.
The popular Hausa language programme on which the journalists and the official appeared was believed to have triggered Friday's killing of the vaccinators by gunmen riding on motorbikes.
The paper identified the three journalists as Gama Muhammad, Mubarak Muhammad and the host of the programme, Yakubu Musa Fagge.
The ex-government official is Rabo Abdulkareem, who said during the show: “I will always be defiant to polio vaccination because nobody will convince me that it wasn’t an act that goes against the will of Allah and it wasn’t a deliberate Western conspiracy against our children.”
Those arrested may face charges of culpable homicide, the police said.
Nigeria remains one of only three countries in the world with new cases of wild polio virus, which causes paralysis in those infected.
Some Islamic clerics in the predominantly-Muslim north are opposed to the administration of the polio vaccine to children, saying the vaccines were laced with compounds that could trigger infertility in the children in later years.
But following public enlightenment by the federal government as well as state governments in the north to debunk such conspiracy theories, cases of rejection of the vaccine have reduced.
Pana 12/02/2013