Washington, June 25 (Inditop.com) A US drone strike on a funeral in Pakistan’s tribal areas narrowly missed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, an American media report said Thursday.
Mehsud was not at the spot at the time of Tuesday’s attack, but had gone to pay his respects to a Taliban commander killed in another American drone strike earlier the same day, a Pakistani security official told the New York Times.
Though the strike on the funeral appeared to have included only two midlevel Taliban leaders among the scores killed, it presented a clear blow to Mehsud’s operation, showing the deadly proximity of the drone attacks to his areas and even the possibility that he was a target, the Times said in a report from Islamabad Thursday.
Pakistani forces have stepped up its operations against Mehsud and his followers in South Waziristan, mostly with airstrikes of its own.
A Pakistani police official said the American drone attack could have been coordinated with Pakistani officials, but could not confirm it. A Pakistani intelligence official, however, said that Islamabad had been coordinating drone attacks with the Americans for several months.
Most drone attacks till recently focused around South Waziristan capital Wana, and were directed at targets that posed an immediate threat to the US, including foreign members of Al Qaeda or Taliban commanders who helped coordinate cross-border attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the report said.
But the drones now have seemed to home in on Mehsud and his men, who pose a growing threat to the security in Pakistan through scores of suicide attacks in the country, it said.
The drones, operated remotely from the US, carried out two strikes in Mehsud’s area in South Waziristan Tuesday.
The first strike hit a compound in Ladha, a village in the mountains of western Pakistan that is Mehsud’s sanctuary, and killed four people including Khwazh Wali, a Taliban leader and close aide to Mehsud.
Later that day, Wali’s body was taken for burial to the village of Zangara, east of Makeen, where people, apparently including Mehsud, went to pay tribute to the Taliban fighter.
The second drone sent three missile to the village when Mehsud was away to the funeral.
There were differing reports on the number of people killed in the second strike. A security official said 80 people had been killed, a resident of a nearby town said the number was closer to 50, and Pakistani television reported that more than 100 had been killed.
