Islamabad, August 21: A suspected US missile strike early Friday killed at least nine people in a border tribal area of northwest Pakistan known as a Taliban hideout, officials said.
“A missile hit a house at 3:50 am (2150 GMT Thursday). It was a drone attack. The missile targeted a house in Dandey Darpa Khel,” a Pakistani security official told AFP.
The house was badly damaged and so far nine bodies have been recovered, a security official said.
Residents said the militants surrounded the compound and a tractor was used to remove the debris.
Another security official confirmed the attack near the Afghan border but could not give a casualty figure.
Residents of Miran Shah, the main town in north Waziristan, said they heard a huge noise which shattered windows and blew out doors in the town.
Dandey Darpa Khel is known to have hideouts belonging to an Afghan Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and was hit in a missile attack last October which killed 11 people.
It also has the offices of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who was reported killed in an August 5 drone missile attack in neighbouring South Waziristan.
Shortly after the missile strike, militants opened fire on a military checkpost near Miran Shah, residents and local officials said.
The firing continued for some time and security forces retaliated but it was not immediately clear if there were casualties in the exchange of fire, an official said.
The US military does not, as a rule, confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy drones in the region.
Pakistan in late April launched a punishing military offensive against the Taliban in the northwest, targeting the rebels in the districts of Swat, Buner and Lower Dir after militants advanced perilously close to the capital Islamabad.
Last month the military claimed to have cleared the area of the Taliban threat, and vowed to turn their attention to the mountainous tribal belt along the border where Mehsud and his Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have thrived since 2007.
Pakistani and US officials accuse Mehsud of masterminding the 2007 assassination of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto and a string of other attacks that have killed hundreds of people here over the last two years.
–Agencies