The attack hit a suspected militant hide-out in North Waziristan, near the Afghanistan border, the officials said.

The strike comes two days after Taleban rebels in the area warned of reprisals if such attacks continued.

There is widespread anger in Pakistan at the increasing use of missile strikes along the Afghan border.

Shahbaz Sharif, Chief Minister of the Punjab region and head of a key political party, said the US was raising tensions between Islamabad and Washington.

“This is creating anger in Pakistan. This is creating friction between our two countries,” he told the AFP news agency.

‘Sovereignty violated’

There were conflicting reports about exactly who was killed in the latest attack, although several reports said at least five people died.

One report suggested four of the five killed were militants, several of them foreigners. Another said three of the five were children.

Two or three missiles were reported to have been fired from a drone aircraft, destroying a “militant hideout in the village of Alikhel in North Waziristan,” AFP quoted an unnamed senior security official as saying.

BBC NEWS

Quoting what it said were more than six unnamed military and intelligence officials and senior Bush administration policy makers, the newspaper said the military operations were authorized by a classified order signed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the approval of President George W. Bush.

Under the order, the military had new authority to strike the al Qaeda network anywhere in the world and a broader mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States, according to the Times.

Despite the order, each mission required high-level government approval, the Times reported.

A former top CIA official told the newspaper that one of the operations included the raid of a suspected militant compound in the Bajuar region of Pakistan. The Times said its sources refused to provide details about the other previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries.

The newspaper said officials made clear there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.

Senior military officials told the paper as many as a dozen additional missions were scrapped because senior administration officials decided they were too dangerous, diplomatically problematic or relied on insufficient evidence.

When contacted by the Times, spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined comment.

WELT ONLINE