Zabihollah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said on Saturday that the unmanned aircraft was downed while conducting a surveillance mission in Rodat district of Nangarhar province.

Afghan and American officials have not yet commented on the incident, but the United States regularly uses drones for assassination strikes and spying missions in Afghanistan, as well as in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt near the Afghan border and also in Yemen.

Washington claims the targets of the drone attacks are militants, but facts on the ground show that civilians have been the main victims of such raids over the past few years.

Meanwhile a U.S. drone strike killed six suspected militants in northwestern Pakistan, security officials said on Friday. Two missiles struck a house in Mada Khel village of the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border on Thursday night, said a security official based in the area.

Six people were killed and three wounded, he said, citing intercepts of Taliban conversations.

Also on Thursday, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) spokesman Usama Mahmoud said two al Qaeda men were killed in a drone strike last week.Mahmoud identified one of two on Twitter on Thursday as Major Sheikh Adil Abdul Qadus, a former Pakistani army major who owned the home where top al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested.

Also the Pakistani Taliban on Saturday claimed responsibility for an attack on a political party camp in the southern city of Karachi which wounded at least 15 people.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman for the Jamatul Ahrar faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, said the attack was in revenge for the arrest and killing of Taliban members in Karachi.

Also on Friday a bomb attached to a motorcycle struck an army vehicle in northwestern Pakistan, killing two soldiers, a police official said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

The bomb exploded as the army vehicle was passing on the outskirts of the city of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, said police official Roohullah Bangash.

Hours later, Pakistani jets killed 22 militants in a troubled northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan.