PESHAWAR, Pakistan Intelligence officials say the leader of the Pakistani Taliban was one of at least three people killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike.
The officials say agents sent to the site of the attack in the North Waziristan tribal area Friday confirmed the death of the militant leader, Hakimullah Mehsud.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Mehsud has been incorrectly reported killed several times before. CBS News' Khaled Wassef reports that most recently, on January 15, 2012, Pakistani intelligence officials reported that intercepted radio messages between militants indicated Mehsud was killed in a U.S. drone airstrike on the 12th of that month.
Other news outlets, including Reuters, also reported Mehsud had been killed Friday but his death has not been independently confirmed by CBS News.
Mehsud has been blamed by Pakistan and U.S. officials for the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
The missile strike hit the village of Dande Derpa Khel in North Waziristan, two intelligence officials told The AP. They said the strike, near the town of Miran Shah, hit a house.
The officials said the village is the stronghold of the Haqqani network, which routinely targets NATO troops in neighboring Afghanistan.
The missiles strike is the second after Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's visit to the U.S. last month where he pressed for stopping of the drone strikes. Most Pakistanis consider the drone strikes to be a violation of the country's sovereignty.
A hard-line religious group protested the strikes Friday in Islamabad and Lahore.
U.S. officials have suggested in the past that the Pakistan government does privately support some of the strikes, which hit militants in tribal regions its army has trouble controlling. The Pakistani government also said this week that 3 percent of 2,227 people killed in U.S. drone strikes since 2008 were civilians, a surprisingly low figure that sparked criticism from groups that have investigated deaths from the attacks.
The strikes also come as Pakistan says its started talks with the country's domestic arm of the Taliban. The leader of one of the country's main opposition parties threatened Thursday to cut off NATO supplies moving through Pakistan if the U.S. launches any drone strikes during the talks.
Also Friday, motorcycle-riding gunmen attacked a truck carrying mineworkers from a Shiite Hazara community in the country's southwest, killing six workers and injuring the driver, a government official said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in the Machh district of southwestern Baluchistan province. An al Qaeda-linked militant group known as Lashker-e-Jhangvi has claimed past attacks on the Shiite Hazara community.
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