A suicide attack in Pakistan has killed seven people in the remote Tirah Valley, an area known as a hideout for militants.
The bomber detonated the explosives at a meeting of government-backed militia members in the Khyber tribal region, along the Afghan border.
More than a dozen men were wounded in the bombing, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, suspicion fell on Pakistani Taliban, who have been blamed for previous attacks against people and groups who support the government in Khyber and elsewhere in the northwestern tribal regions.
Pakistan has been battling Islamist groups in its semi-autonomous tribal belt for a decade with the aid of pro-government local forces.
New al-Qaida faction
Separately, an Islamist faction spokesman said a member of a new al-Qaida offshoot, Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, was killed in an attack by a missile-firing U.S. drone aircraft in the valley last Saturday, according to Reuters.
The spokesman, Usama Mahmoud, identified the militant who was killed in the drone strike as Imran Ali Siddiqi, also known as Waliulla, who had been involved in militancy since 1990 and had served eight years in prison over an attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.
He was killed along with six other people, Mahmoud said in messages on Twitter that were translated by the SITE intelligence group, which monitors Islamist communications.
Some material for this report came from Reuters.
