US drone strike kills eight in Pakistan

24 May 2012, 8:09 pm   -   Source: AAP

A US drone strike on a militant compound has fired two missiles and killed eight insurgents in northwest Pakistan.

A US drone strike has killed eight militants in a Taliban stronghold of Pakistan's tribal belt, bringing the death toll from such strikes to 12 in two days, Pakistani officials say.

"The drone fired two missiles on a house in Hassokhel town," 25 kilometres east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, a security official said on Thursday.

"At least eight militants have died," a senior military official said in Peshawar, the main city in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Two other officials confirmed that the death toll had risen from five to eight.

Washington considers Pakistan's semi-autonomous northwestern tribal belt on the Afghan border the main hub of Taliban and al-Qaeda militants plotting attacks on the West and in Afghanistan.

North Waziristan is a stronghold of the Haqqani network - Afghan insurgents blamed for a series of spectacular attacks on Western targets in Kabul - and Taliban.

Islamabad has resisted US pressure to launch a sweeping offensive in the area, arguing that it is too overstretched fighting homegrown insurgents elsewhere to take on entrenched groups whose primary focus is US troops in Afghanistan.

Residents and local officials said the strike damaged a nearby mosque where three worshippers believed to be central Asians were fatally wounded. "They were seriously wounded and died later in the hospital," a security official said.

Pakistani-US relations went into free fall last year, starting when a CIA contractor shot dead two Pakistanis, then over the American raid that killed bin Laden on May 2 and lastly over US air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November.

After the air strikes, Pakistan shut its Afghan border to NATO supplies and ordered US staff out of an air base reportedly used as a hub for drones.

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