A US drone may have crashed on Saturday in North Waziristan, intelligence officials said while the Taliban claimed that they had shot it down. The Taliban led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur said they had collected wreckage of the destroyed drone and would provide its pictures to the media on Sunday. Security officials, however, said they did not know what caused the drone to crash. “A drone aircraft was seen going down in Machikhel and flames were seen,” an intelligence official said. “We don’t know what caused it to go down.
We are investigating.” Another official said the drone had gone down in an area controlled by militants, about 30 kilometres from the Afghan border. “The local Taliban have the wreckage,” he said. Separately, a US official denied Taliban claims that militants shot down the drone but declined further comment.
