The remote-controlled bomb was planted on the main highway linking Peshawar city with the Torkham border crossing, local official Fazle Akbar told AFP by telephone.

The blast partially damaged the oil tanker, but its driver escaped injuries, Akbar said, adding a passer-by was killed and two local men were injured. A security official also confirmed the incident but gave no casualty figure.

The explosion occurred in the troubled tribal district of Khyber, where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents have carried out a series of attacks on NATO vehicles and terminals outside the northwestern city of Peshawar.

NATO and US-led forces in landlocked Afghanistan are hugely dependent on Pakistan for their supplies and equipment, around 80 percent of which are transported through the neighbouring country.

Militants earlier this month blew up a key bridge on the main supply route for NATO forces and torched several trucks bringing goods from the southern port of Karachi for forces battling a Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

Militants meanwhile shot dead a local police official from the tribal North Waziristan region after accusing him of spying for US forces operating in Afghanistan, police said.

The body of Hameed Khan, 30, who was abducted on February 9, was dumped on the roadside with a note saying that he had been spying for US forces, police officer Aziz Khan said.

Earlier two suicide bombers were killed when their explosives-laden car blew up before hitting its target in a northwestern town early Saturday.

The bombers intended to ram the vehicle into a police post in Bannu district, but it exploded a few metres ahead of its target, police officer Mohammad Habibullah said.

"We have found body parts of two bombers from the blown up vehicle," the officer told AFP. There were no police casualties, he added.

The incident came a day after a suicide bomber ran into a crowd of mourners at the funeral of a slain Shiite Muslim leader in the nearby town of Dera Ismail Khan on Friday, killing 30 people.

The attack sparked riots by angry mobs and the authorities called in troops to control the situation, imposing an indefinite curfew, officials said.

A Sunni Muslim was killed and six wounded in a drive-by shooting in the town on Saturday when a mass funeral for Friday's victims was held, local police chief Mohsin Shah told AFP. The burial was held under troop-enforced security, he said.

Extremist attacks in Pakistan, a key ally in the US-led "war on terror", have killed more than 1,600 people since government forces besieged gunmen holed up in a radical mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.

Much of the violence has been concentrated in northwest Pakistan, where the army has been fighting Taliban hardliners and Al-Qaeda extremists, who fled there after the 2001 US-led invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan.

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