A top Pakistani militant leader has been killed in a US drone strike in South Waziristan, reports say.
Locals said Ilyas Kashmiri was among nine people killed in the overnight strike on the village of Laman.
They said he and his men had only recently arrived in the area. His death has not been confirmed by officials.
Ilyas Kashmiri is head of the Harkatul Jihad al-Islami, an extremist group with close links to al-Qaeda. He is a high-profile figure, wanted by the US.
The BBC's Orla Guerin in Pakistan says he is so close to the al-Qaeda network that his name had been mentioned as a possible successor to Osama Bin Laden.
He is widely believed to have been the mastermind behind an audacious attack on the Mehran naval airbase in Karachi last month, in which six well-organised militants managed to hold off Pakistan's equivalent of the US Navy Seals for 15 hours.
The US also blames him for organising multiple attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - and has offered its maximum reward for a most-wanted target, $5m (£3.04m).
Locals and witnesses in South Waziristan told the BBC's Urdu Service that Kashmiri had been killed in the US attack on a militant hideout west of Wana, the main town in the region, on Friday.
A government official in the frontier city of Peshawar said he had received information of the militant's death but could not confirm it, our correspondent says. There has been no word from militant groups.
In September 2009, Pakistani intelligence officials wrongly declared Ilyas Kashmiri had been killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan.
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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-south-asia-13653324
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