Two Pakistani soldiers killed in suicide attack

TANK, Pakistan, May 28 (Reuters) Islamists militants killed two Pakistani paramilitary soldiers in a suicide bombing near a volatile northwestern town today, officials said.

The attack on the outskirts of Tank town came shortly after militants killed an officer of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) in an ambush in the same area.

The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into an FC convoy when it was passing through the area where their officer was killed in the ambush.

''Two of our soldiers have martyred,'' Muqabil Mehsud, local chief of Frontier Corps told Reuters.

Officials had earlier said that one soldier was killed when militants fired rockets on the FC convoy.

But Mehsud said latest information revealed that it was a suicide attack and two soldiers were killed.

The attacks came hours after police killed four pro-Taliban militants in a gunfire in the town of Bannu, 80 km northeast of Tank.

Both Tank and Bannu lie in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), a gateway to the volatile Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border.

Violence has been increasing in parts of NWFP over the past year or so, evidence, some analysts say, of ''Talibanisation'', or the spread of militant influence from remote tribal regions on the Afghan border to more developed, populous areas.

Two soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb explosion in Tank on Saturday.

Pakistan's tribal belt along the Afghan border is a hotbed of support for al Qaeda and the Taliban, many of whom took refuge in the lawless area after US-led forces routed a Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001.

REUTERS KK KP2105