US strike 'kills' key Pakistan militant

One of Pakistan's most senior militants 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 heads a group that specialises in co-ordinated Mumbai-style strikes on military targets, and is a key commander in al-Qaeda.  He is so senior within al-Qaeda that his name had been mentioned as a possible successor to Osama Bin Laden, the BBC's Orla Guerin in Islamabad says. His death would be welcomed by the White House, she adds. The US 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. Ilyas Kashmiri has been leading a group called the 313 brigade, which is reported to be a unit of the banned Pakistani organisation Harkatul Jihad al-Islami. 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. From BBC News