Pakistanis Condemn Airstrikes

CIA Purportedly Targeted Al Qaeda No. 2 In Deadly Attack

(CBS/AP) 
Many in this nation of 150 million people object to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's alliance with Washington in the war on international terror groups, seeing it as a veiled campaign against Muslims.

More than 8,000 tribesmen chanting "God is great!" took to the streets of a town near Damadola to castigate the attack. Sahibzada Haroon ur Rashid, a local lawmaker from a hardline Islamic party, called it "open terrorism."

Elsewhere in the area, a mob burned the office of a U.S.-supported aid group near Damadola and police used tear gas to disperse a small demonstration in another town, residents said.

In Damadola, villagers said all the dead were local people and denied harboring al-Zawahiri or any other Islamic extremists in the ethnic Pashtun hamlet about four miles from the border with Afghanistan.

"I don't know him. He was not at my home. No foreigner was at my home when the planes came and dropped bombs," said Shah Zaman, whose house was one of those destroyed in the attack.

The strike left three homes hundreds of yards apart in ruins. People in the area said the blasts could be felt miles away.

Doctors told AP at least 17 people died, including women and children, but residents put the death toll at more than 30.

While villagers denied outsiders were present, the Foreign Ministry's statement said a preliminary investigation indicated there was a "foreign presence" in the area — which it said had most likely been targeted from across the border in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's government insists it does not allow the 20,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan to cross the border in the hunt for Taliban fighters or al Qaeda members believed to be hiding in the remote mountains of the frontier region.

But the attack in Damadola was the latest in a string of incidents on Pakistan's side of the border in recent weeks that many people suspect were U.S. assaults that violated this Islamic country's sovereignty.

Last Saturday, U.S. helicopters reportedly attacked a house in the North Waziristan tribal region, killing eight people. Two days later, Pakistan lodged a protest with the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

In December, a senior Egyptian al Qaeda suspect, Hamza Rabia, was killed in what appeared to be a missile strike, also in North Waziristan — although Pakistan's government maintained that Rabia died in a bomb-making accident.

Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, both of whom have $25 million U.S. bounties on their heads, are believed to have been hiding along the rugged Pakistan-Afghan frontier since the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Reports that al-Zawahiri could be close to capture have surfaced before.

In early 2004 during a major Pakistani counterterrorism operation in South Waziristan, Pakistani officials said he was believed to be hiding in the area. The reports were never substantiated.