US drone kills three in NW Pakistan: officials

MIRANSHAH: A US drone strike in a Pakistani tribal area Thursday killed at least three militants, security officials said.

The strike took place in the restive Datta Khel region, 25 kilometres (15 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan tribal district bordering Afghanistan, considered a stronghold of Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

"A US drone fired missiles on a house used by militants, killing three of them," a senior security official told AFP.

Another official also confirmed the missile strike and casualties.

It was not immediately clear if there any high-value targets at the compound at the time of the attack.

"Identities of those killed in the strike also could not be immediately known", the official said.

The area is a stronghold of militants to be linked to Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur and has seen many drone attacks in the past, he added.

Drone strikes, which are extremely unpopular among ordinary Pakistanis, had paused after local authorities arrested US CIA contractor Raymond Davis for shooting dead two Pakistanis in the eastern city of Lahore on January 27.

They later resumed, and Thursday's strike was the third such incident since Davis was held.

Washington insists that Davis, who says he acted in self-defence, is a member of its Islamabad embassy's "administrative and technical staff" who has diplomatic immunity and should be released immediately.

But the government in Islamabad is under huge pressure from the political opposition not to cave in to US demands to free Davis.

An official from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) told AFP on Monday that Davis was an undercover CIA contractor. "He's on contract. He's not a regular CIA guy, but he's working for CIA. That's confirmed," the official said.

Missile attacks doubled in the tribal areas last year as the covert campaign wa! s steppe d up, 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.

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

Pakistan tacitly cooperates with the bombing campaign, which US officials say has severely weakened Al-Qaeda's leadership and killed a number of high-value targets, including the former Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.

But it has stalled on launching a ground offensive in North Waziristan, saying its troops are overstretched.