Pakistan seeks talks with rebels on missing soldiers

ISLAMABAD, Aug 31 (Reuters) Pakistani authorities today sent tribal elders and clerics to negotiate with militants who are believed to have captured more than 100 soldiers in a northwestern region on the Afghan border.

The soldiers disappeared yesterday while travelling in trucks to the town of Ladha, 40 km north of Wana, the main town in South Waziristan.

''We are trying our best to secure their release,'' said Khaista Rehman, a senior administration official in South Waziristan.

Intelligence officials in South Waziristan said the militants had taken the soldiers to different hideouts in the mountains.

Pakistan's military spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Militants in South Waziristan released 18 paramilitary solders and one civilian official this week after holding most of them for nearly three weeks. Earlier, they killed one of the soldiers, videotaping a teenaged boy cutting the man's head off.

The rugged Waziristan region is a hotbed of militant support. It has never been brought under the writ of any government.

Many al Qaeda and Taliban members took refuge in Waziristan and other remote regions on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border after US and Afghan opposition forces toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001.

Violence in Pakistan, mainly in Waziristan and other parts of the northwest, has escalated since the collapse of a peace deal with militants and an army crackdown on a pro-Taliban mosque in the capital last month.

In the latest incident, militants attacked a police post with rocket-propelled grenades and rifles in the Swat region of North West Frontier Province, killing two policemen and wounding six, the region's police chief said.

In another incident in the same region, a passerby was killed and another wounded when a roadside bomb blew up near a police vehicle. The vehicle was damaged but the policemen were not hurt, said police chief Mohammad Iqbal.

REUTERS GL BST1209