MIRANSHAH (Pakistan) - THE latest in a string of bombs in north-west Pakistan killed eight people on Sunday as a US missile strike hit a tribal belt where troops are expected to launch a fresh anti-Taleban onslaught.
Militants remotely-detonated explosives hidden in a rickshaw, causing chaos at a busy Sunday market in Dera Ismail Khan town, with eight people killed and dozens injured, police and hospital officials said.
PAKISTAN publicly opposes drone attacks, saying they violate its territorial sovereignty and deepen resentment among the populace.
Pakistan's military has also recently bombed militant hideouts in South Waziristan - a rugged, semi-autonomous region on the Afghan border - as they escalate a seven-week campaign to crush Taleban militants.
Dera Ismail Khan is about 300 kilometres (186 miles) south of the provincial capital Peshawar, where a commando-style suicide gun and bomb attack killed nine people at the luxury Pearl Continental hotel on Tuesday.
The Pakistani Taleban claimed responsibility for that attack and twin bombings at mosques on Friday, exacting revenge for a seven-week military offensive against them across swathes of the north-west.
'Eight people have been killed and 20 injured in the blast,' said Mr Syed Mohsin Shah, the top administrator of Dera Ismail Khan town.
'The bomb was planted in a cycle-rickshaw and it was rush hour in the bazaar at the time of blast,' he told AFP.
Dera Ismail Khan district borders the lawless tribal agency of South Waziristan, where a suspected missile strike by a US drone aircraft targeting Islamist extremists killed at least three people on Sunday, officials said.
'A drone attack targeting a militant vehicle killed three people in Mardar Algad area,' said Mr Amir Mohammad Khan, a local administration official.
A security official based in Peshawar told AFP: 'Uzbek and Arab militants were killed in the strike.' Washington alleges that Al-Qaeda and Taleban senior leaders and fighters who fled Afghanistan after the 2001 US-led invasion are holed up in South Waziristan, plotting attacks on Western targets.
The US military does not confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the CIA operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy unmanned drones in the region. -- AFP
