US airstrike kills 10 in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD - A suspected US missile strike Thursday killed at least 10 militants, including two Al Qaeda terrorists, in Pakistan’s restive tribal region, intelligence officials said.

Pakistan television channels aired unconfirmed reports that Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud has been killed in the strike, but Taliban as well as security officials denied the reports.

The airstrike came a day after the key US ally in the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan again protested such attacks, warning these could dent relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Four missiles fired from a pilotless aircraft Thursday flattened a compound once used as a seminary and an adjacent house in the remote Shaktoi village in South Waziristan, a tribal district bordering Afghanistan.

“At least 10 Taliban militants were killed and over a dozen other wounded in the attack,” an official said on the condition of anonymity.

Another intelligence official, who also requested anonymity, said that two Al Qaeda operatives of Arab origin were among the dead. The other eight were Pakistani Taliban.

“We are trying to establish the identities of the Arabs,” the second security official said.

Local television channels quoted unnamed sources as saying that Taliban leader Mehsud had died in the attack.

But the second intelligence official said that “there are no reports of even Hakimullah Mehsud’s presence in that area let alone his death.”

Mehsud’s spokesman Azam Tariq also denied the reports as baseless saying that the militant leader was “alive and safe.”

Mehsud had succeeded Pakistan’s most wanted man, Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in August in a US missile strike, in leading Pakistan’s Taliban.

He was seen in a video aired last week sitting beside an Al Qaeda double agent, who later blew himself up inside a US military base in Afghanistan on December 30, killing seven officers with the Central Intelligence Agency, the US spy service.

The Jordanian bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, in what appeared to be his last message, said: “We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud.”

After the suicide attack, US drones carried out more than half a dozen attacks in North Waziristan, a stronghold of militants linked to the network of Afghan Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Pakistan publicly opposes the air raids, saying they violate the country’s territorial sovereignty and stoke anti-American sentiment among the local population.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told the US pointman on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, on Wednesday that such drone attacks would undermine relations between the two states.