WANA, Oct 20: Two soldiers were killed and three others suffered injuries when two army camps came under rocket attacks in the Shakai area, 25 kilometres north of the South Waziristan Agency headquarters in the early hours of Friday, officials and witnesses said.

They said that three other soldiers were wounded in a landmine explosion in the Angoor Adda area near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on the night between Thursday and Friday.

The sources said that several rockets landed in Shakai and the Ganjsar Morcha army camps, killing the two soldiers in the first and wounding three in the latter.

The victims were identified as havaldar Abdur Rehman and sepoy Imran. Names of the wounded soldiers, who were shifted by a helicopter to a military hospital in Bannu, could not be ascertained.

The attack took place around 4am when several rockets, fired from the nearby mountains, landed in the Shakai army camp. A barrage of the projectiles also hit the Ganjsar Morcha camp killing the two soldiers, they said. The army countered the attack and resorted to indiscriminate firing of mortars and other heavy weapons in the direction of the assailants.

Witnesses said that an intense exchange of fire continued well into the morning. “From the intensity of the firing it seemed as if rival armies were engaged in fighting,” residents of the area said.

In the other incident in Angoor Adda, three soldiers sustained injuries when they struck against a landmine in the area. They were shifted to a hospital in Wana.

Our Correspondent from Tank adds: Masked men gunned down a man in Jandola, Frontier Region of Tank district, on Friday morning. Witnesses said that the gunmen attacked Hakim Ghulam Qasim near a mosque in the Jandola bazaar killing him on the spot. The attackers escaped.

The motives behind the murder could not be known, however, residents suspected that it was a target killing.

In another incident of target shooting, Falood Khan Wazir was shot and wounded by unidentified assailants on the Wana-Sholam road on Thursday night. He was taken to a private hospital in the area, where he was stated to be in a critical condition.