American officials said that there were no Afghan refugee camps in Kurram, a remote tribal region straddling the border with Afghanistan, where they said Wednesday’s drone strike had taken place. The strike, which killed Nasir Mehmood, a commander of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, was at least the third American drone strike in the past two months in Pakistani territory.

The United Nations refugee agency also said it had not been operating in the tribal regions of Pakistan since 2005. “We don’t have any access to FATA,” Qaisar Khan Afridi, the agency’s spokesman said, referring to the semiautonomous tribal regions.

But Pakistani officials maintain that there are 43 Afghan refugee settlements in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, and that some of the settlements overlap with the adjoining tribal regions.

The Pakistani military said in a statement that the drone strike had singled out a house in one such settlement in the province’s Hangu District, and that Afghan refugees were present in the settlement. The settlement was not an “organized terrorist sanctuary,” it said.

A Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that the confusion about the location had arisen as the targeted house was in a settlement at the junction of the Kurram, North Waziristan and Hangu regions.