LANDI KOTAL: Seven members of a pro-government group were killed and 13 others injured in a suicide attack in a remote area of Bara in Khyber Agency on Wednesday, sources said.

They said that a young boy detonated his explosive vest in Pir Mela area where some activists of the Tauheedul Islam group had gathered. The attack was carried out at around 8am and it is pertinent to mention that a large number of shoppers visit the Pir Mela market in the morning.

Officials in Bara said local people were among the injured.

The dead and the injured belonged to the Zakhakhel tribe.

A spokesman for the Bara-based outlawed group Lashkar-i-Islam, which has been at loggerheads with Tauheedul Islam for about four years, denied involvement in the attack.

NATO INTRUSION: Five Nato helicopters, among them two gunships, intruded into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Officials in Torkham said that helicopters flew over the border area, including Pasedkhel, for about 10 minutes before returning to Afghanistan.

According to Reuters, militants from across areas along the Afghan border have flocked to the Tirah valley since the army launched an offensive against the Taliban in North Waziristan earlier this year.

“A peace committee meeting was in progress when the suicide bomber entered and blew himself up,” said an elder, referring to the Bara attack.

Separately, a militant faction’s spokesman said a member of a new Al Qaeda offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was killed in a US drone attack in the valley on Saturday.

The spokesman, Usama Mahmoud, identified the killed militant as Imran Ali Siddiqi, also known as Waliulla, who had been involved in militancy since 1990 and served eight years in prison for an attack on the US consulate in Karachi.

He was killed along with six other people, Mahmoud said in a tweet.

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2014