A suicide bomber has killed nine soldiers by ramming his motorbike into a military vehicle in northwestern Pakistan.

Officials said on Friday that the attack was the deadliest against the army this year.

Another five soldiers were wounded in the overnight attack in the district of Bannu, a small town adjacent to the region of Waziristan near the Afghan border.

The region was once controlled by Islamist militants linked to the al-Qaeda militant group.

A military statement late on Thursday said troops cordoned off the area after the bombing and were searching for perpetrators.

No group had claimed responsibility for the latest attacks, but the Pakistani Taliban and the militant Islamic State group had targeted security forces and civilians in the region.

Pakistani Taliban, separated from their Afghan counterparts though both follow the same hardline form of Sunni Islam, had killed thousands of people in such attacks over the past decades.

They were pushed back from their stronghold regions on the Afghan border in a series of offensives since 2014.

They had been seeking to regather after the fall of Kabul to the Afghan Taliban in 2021.

(dpa/NAN)