A pilotless US drone fired two missiles into a Taleban communication center in a volatile tribal region on the Afghan border, killing five militants, intelligence officials said on Saturday. The attack on the center run by Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani Taleban chief and an Al-Qaeda ally, took place late on Friday in the South Waziristan region. “The communication center is totally destroyed and we have reports of the death of five militants,” an intelligence agency official told Reuters by telephone from the region. The United States, grappling with an intensifying Afghan insurgency, began stepping up attacks by drones on northwestern Pakistani militant enclaves a year ago. Most of the recent attacks have hit Mehsud's targets in Waziristan in northwestern Pakistan. More than 40 fighters were killed in similar strikes in the region on Wednesday. US military officials accuse Mehsud of providing suicide bombers for insurgents attacks against US, NATO and Afghan targets in Afghanistan. The United States has announced a reward of $5 million on information leading to the arrest or location of Mehsud. The militant leader is also accused of being behind the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and a campaign of suicide and bomb attacks across the country in recent years. Separately, 10 Taleban and a soldier were killed in a gunfight after militants attacked a checkpost in Zhob district in a southwestern province of Balochistan late on Friday, government and intelligence officials said. In a separate incident, Pakistani police killed one suspected militant and seized a truckload of automatic weapons and explosives after a five-hour shootout early Saturday at a religious school in central Pakistan. Security forces stormed the seminary in Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province after receiving a tip that insurgents loyal to Baitullah Mehsud were hiding out in preparation for an attack, police official Farhat Rasool said. Militants opened fire on police as they entered, and one insurgent was killed in the gunbattle, Rasool said. Two other suspected militants were arrested. “We foiled a major terror plot by seizing bombs, guns, grenades and other weapons,” Rasool said. “There is no doubt that these terrorists were associates of Baitullah Mehsud and they were on a mission to carry out attacks.”
