(MENAFN- Arab Times) A US drone strike killed at least eight suspected militants in Pakistan's restive tribal belt on Wednesday, security officials said.
The unmanned aircraft hit a compound in Kund Sar village, 60 kms (40 miles) south of Miranshah, the main town in the North Waziristan tribal region which borders Afghanistan. "The drone fired two missiles, killing at least eight people and injuring two others," a security official in the area told AFP via phone on condition of anonymity. "There may be more dead bodies under the rubble," he said. An intelligence official in the area confirmed the attack and said militants loyal to the warlord Gul Bahadur and the feared Haqqani network operate in the area, as well as foreign Uzbek fighters.
Another security official in Peshawar also confirmed the strike and said the Haqqani network and foreign militants are active in the area. The strike came a day after Pakistani jet fighters killed 20 suspected members of the Haqqani network, accused of some of the bloodiest attacks in Afghanistan including a blast that left 57 people dead last weekend. In a similar attack on October 30, a US drone strike killed at least seven militants including an important commander of the Haqqani network in the village of Nargas in South Waziristan. Security officials at the time said the commander Abdullah Haqqani was responsible for sending suicide bombers to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, gunmen killed three Pakistani women polio workers and their driver on Wednesday, police said, in the most deadly attack on the health workers in two years. Teams in Pakistan working to immunise children against polio are often targeted by Taliban militants, who say the campaign is a cover for Western spies, or accuse workers of distributing vaccines designed to sterilise children. The women were attacked on their way to meet a police escort, said police official Asad Raza in the southwestern city of Quetta. "Two men on a motorcycle intercepted the van and shot the occupants using a handgun," he said.
Polio cases this year stand at a 15-year high of 265 in Pakistan. The disease, which can kill or paralyse a child within hours of infection, had been eradicated everywhere else, except for Nigeria and Afghanistan. One reason for the spike in Pakistan is a military campaign in North Waziristan, a rugged region on the Afghan border, that forced a large number of unvaccinated children to flee their homes and move around the country in June.
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