DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — A suicide bomber Thursday attacked a prominent Pakistani militant commander in the country’s northwest who is believed to have a nonaggression pact with the army, wounding him and killing seven people, officials said.
The bomber attacked Maulvi Nazir in Wana, the main town in the South Waziristan tribal area, as he was arriving at an office he uses to meet with locals and hear their complaints, said the commander’s spokesman, Maulana Ameer Nawaz. Nazir was not critically wounded, said Nawaz.
Nazir was one of more than a dozen people wounded in the attack, said Pakistani intelligence officials and a local government administrator, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to media. They initially reported that three people died, but later raised the number to seven after some of the critically injured died of their wounds.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban, which has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for the past several years and has jockeyed with Nazir for power in South Waziristan.