Missiles fired by US drone aircraft killed at least three people on Monday in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border where a religious school founded by an old friend of Osama bin Laden is located, witnesses said.
”There were two drones and they fired three missiles,” said a resident of Dandi Darpakheil, a village near Miranshah, main town of the North Waziristan tribal region.
A military official said a house and madrasa founded by Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani was the target of the attack.
The resident said three people had been killed in the attack while doctors said 15 to 20 wounded people, most of them women and children, had been brought to Miranshah’s main hospital.
Haqqani’s younger son said his father and son Sirajuddin had been away from the house at the time.
”Haqqani and Sirajuddin were in Afghanistan at the time of the attack. They are alive,” Badruddin, the commander’s third son, told Reuters by telephone.
Badruddin said one of his aunts had been killed in the attack, and women and children were among the wounded.
Military spokesperson Major-General Athar Abbas confirmed an ”incident” had taken place in North Waziristan and its cause was being ascertained.
Haqqani is a veteran commander of the United States-backed Afghan war against Soviet invasion in the 1970s and 1908s.
Close links with ISI
He also has had close links with Pakistani intelligence agencies, notably the military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The New York Times reported in July that the US Central Intelligence Agency had given Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani evidence of the ISI’s involvement with Haqqani along with evidence of ISI connections to a suicide bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed nearly 60 people on July 7.
While the senior Haqqani is believed to be in poor health and less active, Sirajuddin has been leading the Taliban faction.
Coalition forces in Afghanistan have stepped up cross-border attacks in recent weeks against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistani tribal areas.
US commandos carried out a helicopter-borne ground assault in the neighbouring South Waziristan region on Wednesday in what was the first known incursion into Pakistan by US troops since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Pakistani officials said 20 people, including women and children, had been killed in the attack which drew a furious response from the government.
A day later, four Islamist militants were killed and five wounded in a missile attack in North Waziristan, believed to have been launched by a US drone aircraft.
Intelligence officials and witnesses said five people had been killed in another suspected drone attack on Friday but the Pakistan military denied it. – Reuters