A suspected US missile strike early Friday killed at least nine people in a border tribal area of northwest Pakistan known as a Taliban hideout, officials said. Skip related content

A missile hit a house near Miran Shah, the main town in north Waziristan, at 3:50 am (2150 GMT Thursday), a Pakistani security official told AFP.

"It was a drone attack. The missile targeted a house in Dandey Darpa Khel," he said, adding that the building was badly damaged and so far nine bodies had been recovered.

Residents said the militants surrounded the compound and a tractor was used to remove the debris.

Another security official confirmed the strike near the Afghan border but could not give a casualty figure.

The US military does not, as a rule, confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy drones in the region.

Residents of Miran Shah said they heard a huge noise which shattered windows and blew out doors in the town.

Dandey Darpa Khel, some two kilometres north of Miran Shah, is known to have hideouts belonging to an Afghan Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and was hit in a missile attack last October which killed 11 people.

It also has the offices of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who was reported killed in an August 5 drone missile attack in neighbouring South Waziristan.

Shortly after Friday's missile strike, militants opened fire on a military checkpost near Miran Shah, residents and local officials said.

The firing continued for some time and security forces retaliated, an official said, adding that three militants were killed and two paramilitary troops wounded in crossfire.

Islamabad publicly opposes suspected US strikes, saying they violate its territorial sovereignty and deepen resentment among the populace. Since August 2008, around 51 such strikes have killed more than 517 people.

But many analysts and observers believe that the government gives tacit support to the punishing attacks, as it shares the US goal of eliminating Mehsud's network, blamed for scores of deadly attacks in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The Pakistani military in late April launched a punishing military offensive against the Taliban in the northwest, targeting the rebels in the districts of Swat, Buner and Lower Dir after the insurgents advanced perilously close to the capital Islamabad.

Last month the military claimed to have cleared the area of the Taliban threat, and vowed to turn their attention to the mountainous tribal belt along the Afghan border where Mehsud and his Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have thrived since 2007.

Pakistani and US officials accuse Mehsud of masterminding the 2007 assassination of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto and a string of other attacks that have killed hundreds of people here over the last two years.

Separately, an overnight bomb blast at Pakistan's garrison city of Rawalpindi, close to the capital Islamabad, wounded six people including four policemen, police said Friday.

The blast ripped through a patrol car late Thursday near a police checkpoint at Misriyal road, police said.

"It is still not clear whether it was a grenade attack or an explosive device had been planted," Aslam Tarin, a senior police officer, told reporters.