More than 20 killed in Pakistan clashes

Pakistani forces clashed with heavily armed foreign militants Wednesday, killing more than 20 people in a mountainous tribal region near the Afghan border where hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters are believed to be hiding, officials and a tribal elder said.

The bloodshed follows weeks of failed efforts to get the militants in South Waziristan to surrender to authorities by peaceful means after an army counterterrorism offensive in March that left 120 people dead.

Brig. Mahmood Shah, chief of security for Pakistan's tribal regions, said foreigners and local tribesmen had been holed up in four fortress-like houses, about 25 miles from the Afghan frontier. He said they traded fire with paramilitary and army soldiers who had surrounded the area.

He said about 20 foreign militants and one paramilitary soldier had been killed, and three civilians had died in the crossfire.

"The intermittent shooting continued until 4:30 p.m. and then finally it stopped. According to our information up to 20 foreigners have been killed. We have bodies of several of them. One injured is also with us," Shah told the private Geo television network.

He said seven of the dead had already been buried, but others were lying ravines and could not be recovered.

An army statement said earlier that the bodies of at least eight militants, some of them foreigners, had been retrieved and one wounded militant captured. The security forces suffered a few casualties, it said without elaborating.

Pakistani officials gave no information about the nationalities and the identities of those killed and captured in the clash in the Ghat Ghar area, about 20 miles west of Wana, the main town in South Waziristan.

Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are a possible hideout for Osama bin Laden immediate indication that top al-Qaida figures were among those involved in the clash.

Separately, Afghan and U.S. forces killed scores of Taliban rebels in a seven-day operation hundreds of miles to the southwest in a mountainous district of Afghanistan. They returned late Tuesday from the fighting in the rugged Daychopan district of Zabul province.

Source: CD/Agencies