A missile was fired at a house next to a mosque in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, almost completely destroying the building but killing no one, residents of the area said. A security official said there had been a blast in the village of Sapalga in the North Waziristan region, a militant hotbed on the Afghan border, but he did not know the cause.Residents of the village, south of the town of Miranshah, said they found fragments of metal from a missile believed to have been fired by a U.S. drone aircraft in the middle of the night. "It happened at 12.30 a.m. It was a U.S. pilotless plane that fired a missile while flying very low," Naimatullah Khan, a tribal elder told Reuters.
Khan said the house had been empty and no one had been killed or wounded.
Villagers said drones had been flying over the area for the past two days.
This year, U.S.-controlled Predator aircraft have struck at least four sites used by al Qaeda operatives in northwest Pakistan, killing dozens of suspected militants. The most recent missile strike was in the Bajaur region, to the northeast of Waziristan, on May 14. Neither U.S. nor Pakistani authorities usually confirm U.S. missile attacks on Pakistani territory, which would be an infringement of Pakistani sovereignty.