Salma Farooqi was tortured and repeatedly shot after involvement in Peshawar's battle against polio for four years

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

The unusual night-time kidnapping and brutal murder of a female polio vaccinator in the troubled Pakistani city of Peshawar has heightened fears among health workers struggling to stamp out the virus in the face of violent opposition from militant groups.

The body of Salma Farooqi, a 30-year-old who had been involved for years in Peshawar's battle against polio, was recovered from a field 4km (2.5 miles) from her home on Monday, a day after armed men stormed her house, tied up family members and took her away.

Police said the mother of five had been tortured and repeatedly shot.

Attacks on vaccination teams, many of whom are drawn from the country's 100,000 strong army of "Lady Health Workers", are common, with more than 30 killed in the last two years. But attacks at their homes are almost unheard of.

Family members said armed men entered the house at about 1am on Sunday morning, after some of them climbed over the boundary wall of the building in Gulozai village on the edge of the frontier city of Peshawar.

"Salma was fast asleep next to me when the men came in, beat me and tied me and the children up," said her husband, Mohammad Karim Khan. "It took us an hour to free ourselves and then we saw that Salma had disappeared."

A child held by his brother receives a polio vaccine from a Pakistani health worker on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

Ihsan Shah, the police inspector responsible for the neighbourhood, said it was premature to speculate about the possible motives of the attackers.

But Tariq Khan, an uncle of the dead woman, said he was convinced she was targeted for her work.

"We have no enmity with anyone, but she had been taking part in the polio vaccination campaign for several years," he said. "The government only provide security during the vaccination work because they are being paid millions of dollars by the international community."

The day before her violent abduction, Farooqi took part in a polio campaign, part of a massive effort by the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to stamp out the crippling disease.

Peshawar was recently named by the World Health Organisation as the "largest reservoir of endemic polio virus in the world".

Each weekend for three months up to 8,000 vaccinators are attempting to give oral polio drops to almost every child aged under five in the city.

As in other parts of the country, the threat of attacks by militants has forced health workers to be accompanied by armed police as they go door-to-door looking for children to inoculate against a disease that has been eradicated in almost every other country in the world.

Militants are deeply suspicious of the vaccinations, which have been demonised by radical clerics as supposedly part of a western plot to sterilise Muslim children.

They also fear the campaigns could be used as a cover for spies. In 2012, Taliban commanders in Waziristan, a tribal area bordering Afghanistan, banned polio teams until US drone strikes came to an end.

Mohammad Tahir, a national spokesman for the country's Lady Health Workers, said a committee had been launched to investigate whether Farooqi had been killed because of her work.

"The killing has created an even greater sense of fear," said Tahir. "We have to have better security."