US drone strike kills six in Pakistan

A US missile attack killed six suspected militants on Wednesday, the first such strike for almost a month in Pakistan's tribal badlands near the Afghan border, security officials said.

Drones fired four missiles into a vehicle in the South Waziristan district, targeting a common root for Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants who infiltrate Afghanistan to attack US troops.

"It was a US drone attack. Four missiles were fired. The target was a vehicle. Several militants were killed. The death toll is six," a Pakistani military official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Another Pakistani security official confirmed the same details of the attack near the small town of Angoor Adda in South Waziristan district, around six kilometres (four miles) from the border with Afghanistan.

It was the first missile strike since March 17, when Pakistan's civilian and military leaders strongly protested over a US drone attack that killed 39 people, including civilians and police, in North Waziristan.

This week, the New York Times reported that Pakistan told the United States to rein in drone strikes and slash the number of CIA agents and special forces operating in the conservative, nuclear-armed Muslim country.

The paper said the order highlighted the near collapse of US-Pakistani cooperation since a CIA contractor shot and killed two men who allegedly tried to rob him in broad daylight on the streets of Lahore in January.

Wednesday's drone strike comes just one day after Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, met Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, in Washington.

George Little, a CIA spokesman, told AFP the talks were productive and that relations between the agency and the ISI remained on a "solid footing."

But the New York Times article had quoted a Pakistani official as saying that Pakistan's military "would like the drones stopped," after complaining that the Obama administration's expanded drone attacks had run out of control.

If they cannot be stopped, Pakistan's army chief of staff Ashfaq Kayani demanded, then the campaign should return to the more limited scope they were used for originally and target areas within North Waziristan, the paper said.

The drone strikes inflame anti-US feeling, which is running high after the row over the CIA contractor and recent White House criticism of Pakistan's efforts to defeat the Taliban in the tribal belt on the Afghan border.

Missile attacks doubled in the area last year, with more than 100 drone strikes killing over 670 people in 2010 compared with 45 strikes that killed 420 in 2009, according to an AFP tally.

Most have been concentrated in North Waziristan, the most notorious Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda bastion in Pakistan, where the United States wants the Pakistan military to launch a ground offensive as soon as possible.

Pakistan says its troops are too overstretched to launch such an assault.

The United States does not confirm drone attacks, but its military and the CIA operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy them in the region.

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