(Previous Incident Code: Ob331 )

Between one and four people were killed and up to two others were injured in airstrikes against the Miranshah area of North Waziristan. The majority of sources, including CNN, named those killed as being militants while some sources did not identify whether they were civilians or militants. The strike hit around midnight and the house that was struck was reportedly destroyed.

The identity of the dead was unclear. A security official told AFP they were thought to be of Central Asian origin. However a security official in Miranshah told NBC: “All the victims were members of the Urdu-speaking Punjabi Taliban. They weren’t fighting against Pakistani forces but would cross the Afghan border and attack foreign forces in Afghanistan.”

In the week after the strike, The News identified one of the dead as Abdur Rehman. The newspaper said three Punjabi Taliban were killed in the attack in all. Rehman was reportedly expelled in 2008 from the NED [Nadirshaw Eduljee Dinshaw] University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi.

The attack hit just over a week after the first strike outside the tribal region of Pakistan. It sparked outrage and protests – supporters of Pakistan Tehrik e Insaf (PTI), the leading party in KP provincial assembly, staged a sit-in and blocked Nato supply convoys passing through the province.

On November 27, PTI named a man they said was the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, accusing him alongside CIA director John Brennan of ‘murder’ of those who died in the Hangu strike. PTI named the men in a First Information Report – the first step towards a criminal investigation in Pakistan. The attack came on the last night of General Ashfaq Kayani’s tenure as Pakistan’s military chief. He passed on the baton to Lieutenant General Raheel Sharif, Army Chief of Staff, at a ceremony in Islamabad.