Al Qaeda Commander Killed In Blast

A senior al Qaeda operative has died in an explosion in a northwestern Pakistan tribal area, an intelligence official said Saturday.

Hamza Rabia was among five people killed in the explosion Thursday in North Waziristan, a tribal region bordering Afghanistan, the official said on condition of anonymity due to the secretive nature of his job.

Rabia was believed to be operational commander of al Qaeda militants in the North Waziristan and adjoining South Waziristan, he said.

Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao could not confirm Rabia's reported death.

The explosion near North Waziristan's main town, Miran Shah, was triggered as suspected Islamic militants were making a bomb, a top government administrator, Syed Zaheerul Islam, said Thursday.

Islam said the blast also killed four other people, including two area residents, and wounded two people. He did not identify them.

Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported Saturday that Rabia, believed to be of Syrian origin, was killed in a missile attack on a mud-walled home in Isori, a village east of Miran Shah.

The attack may have been launched from two pilotless planes, the newspaper said, citing unidentified sources.

Associates who were also from outside Pakistan retrieved the bodies of Rabia and two other foreigners and buried them in an unknown location, the report said.

Military officials have said hundreds of Arab, Afghan and Central Asian militants are in North and South Waziristan.

Pakistan, a key ally of the United States in the war against terrorism, has deployed thousands of troops in the area, fighting intense battles with militants and killing and capturing several of them.

Elsewhere, militants blew up one vehicle and ambushed another in volatile southern Afghanistan, killing a district government chief and three police officers and wounding eight others, authorities said Saturday. They blamed Taliban insurgents for both attacks.

In one attack, a remote-controlled bomb blast ripped through a pickup truck Friday evening on a road in the Shah Wali Kot district, 30 miles north of the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, deputy district police chief Obaidullah Khan said.

District administration chief Hayatullah Popul and two police officers traveling with him were killed, and three other officers were seriously wounded, Khan said. Later, district police chief Abdul Qadar said 21 suspected Taliban insurgents had been detained since the attack, including five who were found with improvised explosive devices.

Also late Friday, suspected Taliban rebels ambushed a police vehicle in the Naw Zad district of the neighboring Helmand province, killing one officer and wounding five others, provincial police chief Haji Abdul Rahman said. He said the assailants fled after the attack and avoided capture.

The bomb blast and ambush came amid an upsurge in rebel attacks that has left almost 1,500 people dead this year, mostly in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the worst insurgency-related violence since U.S.-led forces ousted the hard-line Taliban from power in 2001 for failing to hand over Osama bin Laden.

Many attacks have targeted Afghan soldiers and police from the government of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai, as well as American-led coalition troops and NATO-led peacekeepers. Authorities have blamed al Qaeda for some of the violence.

Several attacks have occurred on Friday, the Muslim holy day, including a roadside bomb blast in northern Afghanistan that killed a Swedish peacekeeper a week ago and a blast near the capital, Kabul, a week earlier that killed a Portuguese peacekeeper.

Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan, was the home base of the Taliban as they rose and took control of most of the country in the late 1990s.

In an attack in Shah Wali Kot district last month, rebels killed seven police officers and abducted two after ambushing them on a road leading to Kandahar.