Taliban kill 3 US soldiers in Pakistan roadside bomb attack

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A roadside bomb attack killed at least seven people, including three Americans, in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, news agencies report. The US fatalities represent a significant victory for Taliban militants, who claimed responsibility for the attack, after months of increasing drone attacks.

The US Embassy in Islamabad has confirmed that three US military personnel were killed and two wounded in the blast, the Pakistani daily Dawn reports.

"It appears to be the first time American soldiers have been killed in such an attack in Pakistan," Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said that it had carried out the attack. A TTP spokesman accused the men of working for Blackwater International, a security contractor that changed its name to Xe in 2009 and that attracted widespread criticism over alleged excessive use of force in Iraq.

“The Americans killed were members of the Blackwater group. We know they are responsible for bomb blasts in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities,” a Taliban spokesman told Dawn. “We have warned we will take revenge and today we have avenged the deaths of innocent people.”

Initial reports identified the US dead as either aid workers or journalists. Dawn initially called them officials with the US Agency for International Development, while AFP cited an official from the paramilitary Frontier Corps calling them foreign aid workers, and sources told the Associated Press (AP) they were “part of a small, little-publicized, US mission to train members of the paramilitary Frontier Corps to better fight al-Qaida and Taliban militants.”

Three schoolchildren are reported to have been killed in the attack, which took place near the village of Koto in Hajibad in the district of Lower Dir. (Click here to see a map.) The area lies between Afghanistan and the Swat Valley, which Pakistani forces retook from the Taliban in a military campaign last year.

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