Three people were killed and two others were wounded Saturday by a roadside bomb targeting a local leader of a nationalist party in northwest Pakistan

Three people were killed and two others were wounded Saturday by a roadside bomb targeting a local leader of a nationalist party in northwest Pakistan, police said.
  
The incident took place in Buner district in the troubled northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, close to Swat Valley where Taliban insurgents shot schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in the head, AFP said.
  
Police said the remote-controlled bomb hit the vehicle of Adalat Khan, a local leader of nationalist Qaumi Watan Party, killing him along with two associates.
  
"Adalat Khan and his two associates have been killed. Two others in the car were critically injured," Asif Iqbal, a senior police official told AFP.
  
No militant group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but a local intelligence official told AFP that Khan had supported an Anti-Taliban village militia in 2009. The head of that militia was later killed in a suicide attack in November 2012.
  
Separately, at least nine militants were killed on Saturday when Pakistani gunship helicopters pounded Taliban hideouts in Thall village in Hangu district, near the tribal areas where militants linked to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have strongholds, a security official told AFP. "Gunship helicopters engaged the hideouts after confirmed reports of the terrorists' presence," the security official said.