US missile strike kills 24 in Pakistan

The death toll from a suspected U.S. air strike in northwest Pakistan rose to 24 on Friday as Taliban fighters sifted the rubble for more bodies, local officials reported.

Four missiles believed to have been fired by at least two pilotless U.S. drone aircraft on Thursday evening hit a militant hideout and training camp in the Kurram tribal region on the Afghan border.

"We've so far found 24 bodies in the debris and we're still looking," a Taliban official in the ethnic Pashtun region said by telephone. He declined to be identified.

Two missiles destroyed a Taliban training camp in Kurram, officials said, one of seven semi-autonomous regions near Pakistan's porous border with Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are battling Taliban fighters.

Earlier in the day, a local administration official told AFP that the death toll has risen to 18 as three more bodies were found and as Taliban fighters were "still sifting the rubble for more bodies."

A senior security official told AFP there were “foreigners” among the dead, in reference to al-Qaeda fighters, and that 50 others, mostly armed men were wounded. No high-value targets were believed to have died, the official added.

Another security official said most of the dead were Afghan Taliban. "The training centre was run by local Taliban commander Fazal Saeed and training was underway at the time of the strike," the official added.

Taliban militants sealed off the area after the strike late Thursday.

More than 30 such strikes have killed over 330 people since August 2008, shortly before key Washington ally President Asif Ali Zardari was elected.

The U.S. military as a rule does not confirm drone attacks but the armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy drones in the region.

Thursday's attack was the fifth missile strike blamed on unmanned U.S. aircraft since President Barack Obama came to power, dashing Pakistani hopes that the new administration would abandon the policy.

Pakistan strikes fighters

Meanwhile, a Pakistani army helicopter fired on suspected hideouts of Taliban fighters in the Mohmand region on the Afghan border on Thursday, killing at least 18 militants, security officials said.

Pakistan is under international pressure to eliminate enclaves of Taliban fighters in lawless ethnic Pashtun areas on the Afghan border from where the fighters orchestrate their insurgency in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda plots violence.

"The area was a main militant base and they were carrying out attacks on security forces from there ... now the militants are on the run," said a paramilitary force spokesman in the Mohmand.