Suspected US drone kills at least 1 in Pakistan

               
A suspected U.S. drone strike killed an alleged militant in Pakistan's northwest tribal region, intelligence officials said Friday, the latest indication Washington has no intention of throttling back its unmanned aircraft attacks despite increasing tension with Pakistan over the attacks.           

The overnight strike targeted a house in Qazi Kot village in the North Waziristan tribal area, said Pakistani intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. A suspected member of the Punjabi branch of the Pakistani Taliban was killed, they said.            

The attack came a little over a day after a Pakistani political party revealed what it said was the name of the CIA's top spy in the country and called for him and the head of the agency to be tried for murder for a recent drone strike. The party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, has also been trying to block trucks carrying NATO troop supplies to and from neighboring Afghanistan to protest drone attacks.              

Pakistan's federal government has also been critical of the strikes, calling them a violation of the country's sovereignty and saying they kill too many civilians. That has made the attacks widely unpopular among the Pakistani public. But the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has shown little interest in sparking a crisis with the U.S. over drones.             

The issue is also clouded by the fact that Pakistan's government and military is known to have supported at least some of the strikes in the past, and suspicion lingers that some level of complicity continues  although Islamabad denies the allegation.             

The U.S. rarely discusses the covert CIA drone program in Pakistan in public. But U.S. officials have made clear that Washington views the attacks as a vital tool to target al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan who are outside the reach of American soldiers.           


AP