Unidentified gunmen set 16 Nato oil tankers on fire in Dera Murad Jamali on Saturday. The convoy was attacked before dawn outside the town of Dera Murad Jamali, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south-east of Quetta, local administration chief Abdul Fatah Khajjak said.
"The attackers, riding in a car, opened fire on oil tankers parked at a petrol pump waiting for daybreak to resume their journey to Afghanistan," Khajjak said. Some 16 oil tankers caught fire, but two more parked a distance away were undamaged, he said. A driver's assistant was wounded by the gunfire. Militants fled after the attack, Khajjak said. A security official confirmed the incident.
Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq in a phone call to AFP claimed responsibility for the attack. "It is in retaliation to drone attacks in tribal areas," Tariq said from an undisclosed location in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. "We will continue to attack Nato supply vehicles and warn those operating them to immediately stop doing it otherwise they may also be targeted," he said.
In 2010 the US doubled missile attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas, which it describes as the global headquarters of al Qaeda, with around 100 drone strikes killing more than 650 people, according to an AFP tally. Pakistan tacitly cooperates with the bombing campaign, which US officials say has severely weakened al Qaeda's leadership, but Islamabad has stalled on launching a ground offensive in North Waziristan, saying its troops are overstretched. In October, gunmen torched 29 oil tankers also bound for Afghanistan in the remote Mitri area, 180 kilometres (112 miles) south-east of Quetta.