PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistani troops Friday killed 21 militants, including two suicide attackers, in clashes near the Afghan border, a day after a bombing killed 64 people at an arms factory, officials said.
Pakistan's shaky coalition government is struggling with an upsurge in Taliban bloodshed, with Thursday's attack near Islamabad being the second major attack since Pervez Musharraf resigned as president on Monday.
The army said in a statement that 16 "miscreants" were killed in a gunbattle that broke out after they refused to leave a vehicle at a checkpost near the restive northwestern town of Hangu.
"One individual got down from the vehicle and started moving towards the checkpost. He was cautioned to stop and on refusal was engaged with fire. Resultantly, he exploded," the statement said.
"The vehicle was engaged with fire by the security forces due to which the vehicle also exploded," likely from the detonation of another suicide bomber's device, the statement said.
One militant was captured alive and the two suicide bombers both appeared to be foreign militants, the statement said, without giving their nationalities.
Local police officer Sher Bahadur, who gave a death toll of 15, told AFP that the militants "hurled grenades and opened fire at the soldiers" after the vehicle was stopped at a checkpost.
Taliban militants besieged a police station and kidnapped several government officials in Hangu in July.
Meanwhile, in the adjoining region of Bajaur, one of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal zones bordering Afghanistan, helicopter gunships killed another five rebels, officials said.
A major military offensive in Bajaur in the last two weeks has left more than 500 people dead, most of them militants, officials say.
Three died when gunships destroyed their vehicles as they were driving outside Khar, the main town in Bajaur, on Friday, a senior security official said on condition of anonymity.
Two more militants were killed when gunships targeted a compound in Salarzai village in Bajaur, the official added. In another strike near the same village 11 suspected militants were wounded.
A Taliban spokesman said Thursday that the double bombing at the army's main munitions factory in Wah, near Islamabad, was in revenge for the military operation in Bajaur and in the northwestern tourist region of Swat.
A third person, who was to have been one of the suicide bombers in the Wah factory attack, was arrested Friday, police said.
Separately, Taliban militants fired rockets overnight at a police station in Bada Bahr, near the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing one policeman and wounding two others, police said.
The violence inside Pakistan's borders comes amid mounting pressure from Washington and other Western allies to stop militants based in the tribal belt launching attacks on foreign troops in Afghanistan.
But in a rare example of cooperation, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said it had launched an artillery attack on militants in Pakistan in coordination with the Pakistani military.
NATO forces fired "multiple artillery rounds into Pakistan last night after the Pakistan military confirmed insurgents were preparing to fire rockets at an ISAF base in (Afghanistan's) Paktika province," an ISAF statement said.
It said it was unable to confirm the number killed since they were inside Pakistan. There was no immediate comment from Pakistan.
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