US missiles kill 32 militants in Pakistan

An Egyptian al-Qaeda operative described by the United States as the terror network's propaganda chief was killed in a missile strike in Pakistan, security officials said yesterday.
Suspected US missiles struck two deadly blows Friday killing 32 mainly al-Qaeda operatives and injuring a key Taliban commander in a Pakistani tribal area near the Afghan border, officials said.
The two strikes within a few hours were the latest in series of attacks that have raised tensions between Washington and Islamabad.
Abu Jihad al-Masri was among several rebels killed when two missiles fired by a suspected US spy drone hit a truck in the North Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan on Friday night, they said.
The United States has offered a one-million-dollar bounty for the death or capture of al-Masri, who has appeared in an anti-Western video introduced by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two.
"The strike was aimed at a vehicle carrying Abu Jihad and two others. The target was successfully hit and all three people were killed," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
His death came in one of two separate missile attacks in Pakistan's troubled tribal belt on Friday, the latest in a series of 18 strikes in the past three months that have raised tensions between Washington and Islamabad.
The attacks also come just days before the US presidential election, in which the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan has been a key foreign policy issue.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Pakistani military or from US forces deployed in Afghanistan about al-Masri's death.
The US State Department's Rewards for Justice website said that the balding al-Masri "is in charge of al-Qaeda media and propaganda. He may also be the chief of external operations for al-Qaeda".
It said that he was believed to operate out of Iran, but Pakistani officials said that he was known to have moved to the Pakistani tribal belt in 2005 or 2006. It said he also went by the alias Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim.
In 2006, al-Masri appeared in a video introduced by his fellow countryman Zawahiri, in which al-Masri said that his own Islamic group, Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya, had joined forces with al-Qaeda.