PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) ― A suicide bomber in northwest Pakistan Saturday killed the head of a local peace committee, three of his guards and two others, police said.

The bomber struck as Fateh Khan, whose committee opposes Islamic militants, left a petrol station in the city of Buner 150 kilometers northeast of Peshawar, the capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“The suicide bomber blew himself up in front of Fateh Khan’s vehicle. Three guards boarding the vehicle and two passersby were also killed in the attack,” Jehanzeb Khan, the district police chief, said adding that up to five people had also been injured.

Another senior police official confirmed the death toll.

“We can confirm the death of six people from the suicide attack in the Buner district including the head of a local peace committee Fateh Khan,” Akhter Hayat Khan, a senior police official in Malakand division, said.

The police officials said Khan was actively opposed to Islamic militants and played a leading role in forcing them out of the region in 2009. He was also an active district level political leader.

Suicide and bomb attacks blamed on Islamist insurgents have killed more than 5,200 people since July 2007 across nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Buner neighbors Pakistan’s picturesque Swat valley, which fell to Taliban militants in 2009.

The army declared the region, once known as the “Switzerland of Pakistan,” back under control in July 2009 after defeating radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah and the Taliban fighters who had waged a two-year campaign of terror.

The operation won praise in the United States and was arguably Pakistan’s most successful offensive to date against homegrown insurgents.

The region, however, is once again gripped by fear. Fifteen-year-old child rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban last month and was sent to a U.K. hospital for treatment.

Washington considers Pakistan’s semi-autonomous northwestern tribal region, which includes North Waziristan, as the main hub of Taliban and al-Qaida militants plotting attacks on the West and in Afghanistan.

The al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network in North Waziristan, blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan, is one of the thorniest issues in relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Washington has long demanded that Pakistan take action against the Haqqanis, which the United States blames for attacking the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last year and acting like a “veritable arm” of the Pakistani intelligence service.

However Pakistan says it will act according to its own needs and priorities and not on the wishes of a foreign government.