US drone crashes in Pakistan
MIRANSHAH (Pakistan): On Sunday an unmanned United States drone aircraft crashed in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern tribal district after suffering a technical fault, said local security officials.
The drone, the second to crash in Pakistan within the last month, went down in South Waziristan, part of the lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border that Washington calls a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
“The American drone crashed in Zangara village of South Waziristan, apparently because of some technical faults,” a security official in Peshawar, the main town in Pakistan’s northwest, told AFP.
It was an armed Predator drone, they said. Two intelligence officials in Wana, the main town of South Waziristan, confirmed the incident.
The United States uses unmanned surveillance aircraft in its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan to monitor militants in Pakistan, from where Al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked fighters launch attacks in Afghanistan.
It also uses Predator armed drones to launch missile attacks aimed at militants in Pakistan’s unstable northwestern border areas.
US drone crashes are very rare in Pakistan, but a surveillance drone equipped with a camera crashed in southwestern Pakistan on August 25.
In September 2008, tribesmen in South Waziristan claimed to have shot down another surveillance drone in Jalal village, near the Afghan border.
The Pakistani army said at the time that it was investigating that incident but did not make the results of the probe public.
