Suspected US drone attack kills 15

Missiles pounded the town of Datta Khel near what US officials believe is the headquarters of the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent force that has staged deadly bombings in Afghan cities and regularly attacks NATO troops in eastern Afghanistan.

The Associated Press, quoting Pakistani intelligence officials, reported that the strike targeted a vehicle suspected of carrying foreign militants and damaged a nearby restaurant and home. Officials also reported that at least one of the dead was a civilian.

Friday’s strikes — the first since the US helicopter raid on the compound of Osama bin Laden in northwest Pakistan on Monday — are likely to further stoke tensions between the two allies.

CIA drone strikes in the past year frequently have struck North Waziristan, home to a stewpot of Islamist militant groups that the United States has long pressured Pakistan’s army to clean up. Pakistan calls the strikes violations of its sovereignty, though the nation tacitly allows them.

As relations with the United States soured this year, Pakistani military officials have demanded a decrease in the strikes, depicting them as a “unilateral’’ tactic that no longer depends on shared intelligence.

On Thursday, Pakistan’s military also criticized the bin Laden raid as a violation of the nation’s sovereignty, warning that further such operations would prompt Pakistan to reconsider its alliance with the United States.

“There was no need to a shortcut or to bypass Pakistan,’’ said Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, speaking aboard his official plane as he returned from Paris yesterday, according to a Pakistani news service.

Also yesterday, religious parties held gatherings in various cities to protest bin Laden’s killing and to call on the government to cut ties with the United States.

By midday, however, the rallies had attracted few people. Though Pakistan is the hub of many Islamist extremist groups, including Al Qaeda and the Taliban, bin Laden’s death has spurred little public reaction here.

In Lahore and Abbottabad, the garrison city where bin Laden hid out in a walled compound, a few hundred protesters shouted anti-American slogans and called on the Pakistani government to cut the nations’ ties.

In Rawalpindi, organizers said they would cut the sparsely attended rally short because of rain.

“The military and political leadership is without integrity. These generals have just laid down in front of America,’’ Zikrullah Mujahid, a leader with the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, said in Lahore. “American terrorists did what they wanted.’’

In Washington on Thursday, Obama administration officials said they were uncertain whether the military’s combative statement — which also acknowledged “shortcomings’’ in Pakistani intelligence on bin Laden — reflected Pakistan’s stance or whether it amounted to posturing for a domestic audience.