US drones have fired a barrage of missiles at a vehicle and a house in a Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan, killing at least five suspected militants.Officials say the strikes, on Saturday in North Waziristan, were the first since news that a top commander of the powerful Haqqani militant network was killed in a drone strike there late last month.
The strikes came also as a group of gunmen on motorcycles in Afghanistan''s southwestern Baluchistan province killed seven Shi''ite Muslims in the latest escalation of violence against the country''s minority sect.
Two intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said US drones fired seven missiles at targets in the village of Degan in an area of North Waziristan close to the Afghan border.
They said the area is dominated by anti-American militant commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur but they did not know whether the men killed belonged to his group.
Bahadur''s faction is alleged to have been involved in frequent attacks on US troops in Afghanistan but generally shies away from carrying out operations inside Pakistan.
Several drone strikes have killed militants affiliated with Bahadur''s group.
The CIA-run drone program is controversial in Pakistan. Many call it an infringement on the nation''s sovereignty and maintain it causes a high number of civilian casualties, a charge the US denies.
A drone strike a week ago in North Waziristan killed Badruddin Haqqani, one of the sons of the founder of the Haqqani network. The US has blamed the group for a number of high-profile attacks in Afghanistan and considers it one of the key factors in undermining security there.
Badruddin was considered the organisation''s day-to-day operations commander and he was labelled as a terrorist by the US State Department, along with his father and two of his brothers.
Also on Saturday, four gunmen riding two motorcycles stopped a local bus near the central vegetable market of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.
The gunmen identified seven people belonging to the Shi''ite Hazara community, forced them off the bus and shot five of them dead, senior police officer Wazir Khan Nasir said.
Two tried to run away but the gunmen chased them down and killed them in a nearby street, Nasir said.