Suicide attack kills six troops in Pakistan

A suicide car bomb attack in northwest Pakistan killed six soldiers and wounded about a dozen others on Saturday, police said. The attack took place in Bannu city where the bomber targeted the camp office of the paramilitary Frontier Corps troops, who are deployed in militant-infested North Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan. "The bomber drove his explosives-packed vehicle into the FC building," local police official Muhammad Shafiq told AFP. He said the camp office was damaged in the attack. Two local intelligence officials also confirmed the attack and feared the death toll could rise. "There may be some more dead bodies lying under the debris of the single-storey building which was attacked from the back," they told AFP. Senior local police official Feroz Shah said the death toll stood at six, from an initial toll of five killed and 12 wounded. No one has so far claimed responsibility for the attack on the camp, which is a base for Frontier Corps troops, also known as the Tochi Scouts, before and after deployments in North Waziristan. Bannu is 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. Washington has called Pakistan's semi-autonomous northwest tribal region the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda, where Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked networks need to be defeated if the 10-year war in Afghanistan is ever to end. A covert US campaign of drone strikes against militants in the region has been halted following a NATO cross-border attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The November air strikes plunged the precarious Pakistani-US alliance to its lowest ebb in a decade with both sides still in dispute about the precise sequence of events. Islamabad has kept its Afghan border closed to NATO convoys since November 26, boycotted the Bonn conference on Afghanistan and ordered Americans to leave an air base understood to have been a hub for CIA drone strikes on the Taliban.