US to pay $1.2m to Italian family of drone strike victim

THE United States government has agreed to pay €1.1m ($1.2m; £934,00) to the family of an Italian aid worker killed by a drone strike in Pakistan, reports say.
Aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, 37, was killed while being held hostage by al-Qaeda in 2015. A US aid worker being held with him also died, BBC revealed.
There has been no official confirmation of the settlement from the White House.
President Barack Obama admitted the deaths in April last year, saying that he profoundly regretted them.
The White House said at the time that the operation had targeted an al-Qaeda compound in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that they had believed there were no civilians present.
But according to La Repubblica newspaper (in Italian) and the Guardian newspaper, the agreement states that Mr Lo Porto was killed inside Pakistan.
The payment was considered a “donation in memory” of the Italian, La Repubblica said.
Mr Lo Porto had disappeared from Multan, Pakistan, in January 2012 but little is known about what happened then. He had worked for an international aid group called Welthungerhilfe.
The strike killed fellow aid worker Warren Weinstein, 73, and American Ahmed Farouq, described as an al-Qaeda leader.
The Guardian says this is the first agreement reached by the US and the family of a victim of a drone strike.