ISLAMABAD, 1 February 2008 — Pakistani security officials said yesterday government forces had retrieved and buried the bodies of 12 militants who were killed in a missile attack on Monday night. The missile was fired by a drone on a residential compound in the Khushali Toorikhel area of North Waziristan.

The officials quoted local intelligence as saying that seven of those killed were Arabs while the other five were of central Asian descent.

The compound, located about 3 km south of Mir Ali town, is owned by Abdus Sattar, a driver, who survived the attack.

The attack remained a mystery with no one claiming responsibility for it. Local residents said the missile was fired by a drone but officials have maintained silence. “I heard the sound of a plane just before the explosion,” said a man who identified himself as Zaheer Gul.

His father Haji Pazir Gul, a reporter of state-run Pakistan TV, too confirmed the deaths of Arabs but said the military had not made public their nationalities.

Several places in the North Waziristan have come under attack in the recent past. A house was attacked in Mosaki village in Mir Ali tehsil in December 2005 in which Al-Qaeda’s operational commander Hamza Rabia was killed.

Many of the attacks were attributed by local residents to US forces fighting Al-Qaeda and Taleban in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistani officials never confirm strikes by US-led forces because of sensitivities over national sovereignty.

President Pervez Musharraf has recently fought off increasing pressure from his allies in Washington to allow US troops to hunt down Al-Qaeda and Taleban rebels in the rugged tribal belt.

Pakistan has 90,000 troops in the tribal belt fighting militants — many of them foreign — who fled Afghanistan after US forces toppled the Taleban regime following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Many of the insurgents were given shelter by the region’s conservative ethnic Pashtun tribes, and have since turned the area into what US officials describe as a major haven for Al-Qaeda operations.

Elsewhere, a roadside bomb damaged a Pakistan Air Force truck yesterday but there were no casualties. The explosion happened near the northwestern town of Akora Khattak but it was not immediately clear whether the vehicle, carrying three people, was the target.

“A roadside bomb blast occurred when a truck was passing near Akora Khattak,” an air force spokesman said. “The truck was damaged slightly and there are no injuries. It was a remote controlled bomb planted between two roads. When the vehicle came close, unknown miscreants detonated the bomb,” senior police officer Mubarik Zeb said.

In the southwestern city of Quetta, a bomb yesterday injured three people outside an anti-terrorism court and government offices. The device was planted in a bicycle stand outside the office of the local district coordination officer, where an anti-terrorism court is also situated, police said.

“The blast occurred after an unidentified man parked his bicycle in the stand outside DCO office and three people were injured,” senior police officer Raja Ishtiaq said.

— Additional input from agencies