A roadside bomb aimed at police elsewhere in the country's volatile northwest killed a civilian and wounded eight people. Also, militants opened fire on police outside a court in the southern city of Karachi, killing one policeman and getting four of their accomplices freed.
The attacks came as US special envoy Richard Holbrooke met with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad, the latest in a series of visits aimed at shoring up Pakistani support for the American effort in Afghanistan.
The missile, apparently fired from an unmanned drone, struck a house in Haider Khel village near North Waziristan's Mir Ali town, said two intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Local government official Noor Mohammad said at least 13 people had been killed, while the intelligence officials said some foreigners were among the dead. Their exact identities and nationalities were not immediately clear.
The US frequently uses missile strikes to take out Taleban and Al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan's northwest, especially the lawless tribal regions where many insurgents hide.
This year, the vast majority of the missile strikes have landed in North Waziristan, a segment of the tribal belt that houses several militant groups that focus on attacking Western troops across the border in Afghanistan.
Pakistan publicly protests the strikes as violations of its sovereignty, and the attacks are deeply unpopular among the Pakistani people. The US does not publicly acknowledge the existence of the covert, CIA-run program.
During a news conference Saturday, Holbrooke said Al-Qaeda had been severely degraded in recent years. But he declined to lay blame for the failure to find Osama Bin Laden or Afghan Taleban leader Mullah Omar.
The two wanted men are "still at large, but they are under an intense pressure," Holbrooke said. The envoy also praised Pakistan's efforts in fighting militancy and acknowledged the thousands of lives the country has lost in the fight.
The roadside bomb in Dera Ismail Khan, which lies near the tribal belt, showed that militants continue to be active despite US missile strikes and Pakistani Army offensives against them.
Senior police official Aslam Khatak said the attack happened as the patrol vehicle traveled through the gritty town and that among the wounded was an area police officer who played an important role in arresting militants. Six policemen and two civilians were wounded, while the one fatality was a passer-by.
In Karachi, four armed militants threw hand grenades on policemen who were escorting back to prison four militants after producing them before a judge in the city courts. "An officer died on the spot and another was wounded in the attack," a police spokesman said, adding an attacker was also killed during a gunfight with police. "The attackers got their four accomplices freed and escaped while firing indiscriminately," the spokesman said.
Police said the militants belonged to an outlawed Sunni organization, Jundallah.
The group is accused of carrying out a number of terrorist attacks in the country including a recent attack on a Shiite procession earlier this year in Karachi that left 76 people dead.
