'US targeted Zawahiri in air strike'

CNN quoted sources saying the CIA ordered Friday's strike after receiving intelligence Zawahiri was in a village near the border with Afghanistan.

ABC News quoted Pakistani military sources as saying five of those killed were "high-level" al Qaeda figures.

The attack killed at least 18 people, including women and children, locals say.

US sources in Washington knowledgeable about the strike, believed to have been conducted by CIA-operated unmanned drones armed with missiles, told Reuters it would not be known whether Zawahiri was killed until the remains of the dead were examined.

Pakistan was investigating the reports, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said. "Our investigation is still going on ... I cannot confirm anything," he told Reuters.

A Pakistani intelligence source said he had been told by US officials the strike was ordered based on information Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had been invited to a dinner to celebrate this week's Muslim Eid al-Azha festival.

But they had no confirmation either had been there at the time of the attack about 3 am on Friday (2200 GMT Thursday) and senior Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah told Reuters no Taliban commander had been there.

Another intelligence official said four US aircraft had fired four missiles that destroyed three houses in the attack on the village of Damadola in the Bajaur tribal agency opposite Afghanistan's insurgent-troubled Kunar province.

While 18 villagers were killed -- eight women, five men and five children -- another five bodies were thought to have been removed after the attack and Pakistani agents were uncertain where they had been taken, said the first intelligence source, who declined to be identified.

One Damadola resident said three or four foreigners had come from Afghanistan for Eid. Another said he had seen bodies of at least two people who seemed to have been outsiders.

"Where these bodies have gone, I don't know," he said.

Meanwhile Pakistani tribesmen torched the office of a US-funded aid group Saturday amid protests against the deaths of 18 people in an alleged US airstrike targeting Al-Qaeda's number two, witnesses said.

An estimated 5,000 people gathered at a stadium near Khar, the main town in the Bajur tribal zone, close to the village of Damadola where Friday's attack happened, an AFP reporter said.

Some demonstrators then set fire to the offices of Associated Development Construction, a non-governmental organisation funded by the US Agency for International Development, an official at the aid group said.

"They people have attacked our office in reaction to the deaths on Friday and put it on fire, it is badly damaged," site engineer Fazal Maibood told AFP.