US to pay $1.2m to drone strike Italian family victim read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/878-us-to-pay-1-2m-to-drone-strike-italian-family-victim

The US government has agreed to pay €1.1m ($1.2m; £934,000) to the family of an Italian aid worker killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.

The White House has said that a US counterterrorism operation in January accidentally killed two hostages who were being held by alQaeda.

Aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, 37, was killed while being held hostage by alQaeda in 2015 was kidnapped in Multan, Pakistan, in January 2012. He worked for an international aid group called Welthungerhilfe

US aid worker Warren Weinstein, 73, being held with him also died in the operation. Warren Weinstein an American development worker, was kidnapped from his home in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2011. He had lived in Pakistan for seven years, working on economic development projects.

The White House has confirmed that payments were made to both families, without releasing details.

President Barack Obama admitted the deaths in April last year, saying that he profoundly regretted them. It was announced that compensation would be paid to the families.

US military commanders have long tried to make condolence payments to families of innocent people who've been killed in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Making these payments has been harder when the civilians were killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Libya and other places where the US is not officially at war, however. The drone strikes themselves were kept secret, and determining whether or how to provide money for victims' families has been fraught.

In July, however, President Obama released statistics on civilians killed in airstrikes outside of conventional war zones official estimates of the dead range from 64 to 116.

And now the families of Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein have received a payment. These are important steps for Mr Obama, part of a fitful, halting effort to provide transparency about the government's actions and to do the right thing, even when operating in the shadowy world of targeted killings.

The payment was considered a "donation in memory" of the Italian, La Repubblica says.