The pre-dawn incident took place in Sheikhan village, a suburb of Beautiful Downtown Peshawar close to the Khyber tribal district, where the military is fighting against local warlord Mangal Bagh
...a former bus driver, now head of the Deobandi bandido group Lashkar-e-Islam and the Terror of Khyber Agency
...and his Lashkar-e-Islam faction.
"The victims were asleep. A mother and her three children was struck down in his prime," Shafiullah Khan, a police brass hat told Agence La Belle France Presse.
The two sisters and their brother were aged between two and nine years, Khan said.
The officer said it was not yet clear who fired the mortar bomb but Pak troops and Mangal Bagh's fighters exchange fire on a daily basis.
More than 250,000 people have fled the fighting in Khyber since January, according to Pak officials.
Khyber is part of Pakistain's semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border, considered to be the world's premier al-Qaeda hub despite the killing of the late Osama bin Laden
... he's rotten though not quite forgotten...
by United States troops last year.
Separately, Talibs on Sunday bombed a government-run high school for boys in the outskirts of Peshawar, partly destroying the building.
The remote-controlled bomb was planted on the outer wall of the school.
Islamist gunnies oppose girls education and have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in northwest Pakistain in recent years.