(Previous Incident Code: Ob296 )

An alleged US led drone strike reportedly targeted a motorbike (or possibly car) near Mir Ali in North Waziristan, killing at least two alleged militants.

A security official told AFP that “US drones fired four missiles on a militant vehicle, killing three rebels.” AP cited officials as saying that ‘the men appeared to be foreigners, but that their identities are not known’.

An Arab was killed, PakObserver suggested, targeted a motorcycle with a couple of projectiles with one missile landing closed to the bike and the other hitting the directly the bike eliminating both the vehicle. The rider who was an Arab militant adding that according to some accounts the attack “targeted a motorcycle with a couple of projectiles with one missile landing closed [sic] to the bike and the other hitting the directly the bike eliminating both the vehicle and the rider who was an Arab militant”.

The News also cited locals people who reported that a motorbike carrying two men was struck as it drove through a dry stream bed.

The villagers said the bodies were disfigured and were beyond recognition. The identity of the slain men wasn’t known, but official sources said they were militants.

Locals had reported seeing several drones flying over the area prior to the attack. The previous US strike on September 24 which killed two named al Qaeda militants had also targeted the village.

In October 2013 the Washington Post reported that the strike targeted and killed Hassan Ghul aka Mustafa Haji Muhammad Khan, an al Qaeda member who had been tracked down by the CIA using surveillance information provided by the NSA. An email sent by his wife had unwittingly given the clues to his location away, documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed. The Washington Post described Ghul as ‘an al Qaeda operative with a knack for surfacing at dramatic moments in the post-September 11 storyline’: he was detained in 2004, and during interrogation he let slip details about Osama bin Laden’s courier that eventually led to bin Laden’s death. He was held in a secret CIA prison until 2006, when he was handed over to the Pakistani authorities, who later released him.

An NSA counter-terrorism unit ‘spent a year tracking Ghul and his courier network, tunnelling into an array of systems and devices, before he was killed,’ the Washington Post revealed.

A January 2013 article by Vocativ suggested that Ghul had been deliberately released by the Pakistani authorities so that he could re-infiltrate al Qaeda networks in Pakistan as an informant for either the ISI, Pakistan’s security services, or the CIA, but that he had later turned ‘triple agent’ and was killed by the CIA.