Two senior Taliban faction members killed in US drone strike on Pakistan

Two senior members of a feared Afghan insurgent group were killed early on Thursday in the first strike by a US drone outside Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. A Pakistani intelligence official claimed five people were killed by the early morning strike on a religious seminary in Hangu, a district bordering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where nearly all US drone strikes have taken place in the past.

Residents and police claimed three or four missiles were fired at a section of the mud-built madrasa

just before 5am. The seminary's students, many of whom were sleeping in a nearby room, escaped unhurt.

The intelligence official, who asked not to be named, said all five killed were members of the Haqqani network, a militarily highly capable Taliban faction, including Mullah Ahmed Jan, a senior fundraiser known as the "minister of finance" and a close aide to the group's leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani. Jan's body was taken away for burial in North Waziristan shortly after the strike, according to witnesses.

Reuters reported that Haqqani himself had been spotted at the madrasa two days before the strike.

The four other men were Mullah Hamidullah Afghani, another senior adviser to Haqqani, Mullah Abdullah Afghani, Mullah Abdur Rehman Mengal and Karim Khan, the intelligence official said.

Confirming the identity or even a figure for people killed by drone strikes is notoriously difficult, but if the claims are true then Thursday's attack is a major blow to the Haqqani network, even at the cost of inflaming anger towards the US among Pakistan's politicians, who have been infuriated by recent strikes.

On 11 November the group's chief fundraiser, Nasiruddin Haqqani, was assassinated while buying bread at a bakery in Islamabad, the capital city, where he had apparently lived quite openly for several years.

Mystery surrounds his killing, with the finger of blame pointed at various possible culprits, including the Pakistani Taliban and Afghanistan's spy agency. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the political party that has campaigned most vociferously against drone strikes, declared that the attack "was a declaration of war against the people of Pakistan by the US". The party's leader, Imran Khan, had already threatened to try to disrupt convoys carrying Nato supplies to Afghanistan through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the north-western province where the PTI is in power.

Even the killing of militants regarded as lethal enemies of Pakistan creates considerable anger. The death of Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in a drone strike on 1 November was blamed by the interior minister for wrecking the government's efforts to start peace talks with militant groups.

Of the 379 drone strikes understood to have taken place in Pakistan since 2004, all but a handful have been inside the FATA, a semi-autonomous region that a multitude of militant groups have made their home. In many areas, particularly the tribal area of North Waziristan, the Pakistani government has little or no power to control militants linked to al-Qaida.

Analysts have long suspected that the US receives permission from Pakistan to conduct drone strikes in specific areas, which are deliberately cleared of Pakistani aircraft. Hangu, which borders the tribal agency of Orakzai, is regarded as being just inside what in Pakistan is known as the "settled areas" of the country. Pakistan's government issued a statement condemning the attack, a now standard procedure after the missile strikes.

"There is an across the board consensus in Pakistan that these drone strikes must end," the foreign ministry said. "It has been consistently maintained that drone strikes are counter-productive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives and have human rights and humanitarian implications. Such strikes also set dangerous precedents in the inter-state relations." On Wednesday the government claimed it had been given assurances by the US that drone strikes would be suspended during peace talks with militants.