PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - - Pakistani forces pressed ahead with an anti-militant offensive near the Afghan border for a second day Sunday, in a move aimed at easing US fears over Islamabad's talks with insurgents.
Soldiers were setting up checkposts in the northwestern Khyber tribal district, a day after launching the operation and demolishing the house of a leader of an Islamist group accused of threatening the main city of Peshawar.
The operation is the first by the new government since it began negotiating with Taliban militants after elections in February -- although officials said the targeted rebel warlord, Mangal Bagh, had no direct links to the Taliban.
"The situation is under control. There has been no resistance," senior local administration official Mehmood Afridi told AFP. Officials said earlier that one militant had been killed in an exchange of fire.
"Paramilitary forces have taken up positions near Bara (the main town in Khyber district), they are setting up a number of checkposts and bunkers while several key roads have been sealed," he added.
After the offensive was launched on Saturday, television footage showed tanks and camouflaged armoured personnel carriers rumbling into the area, while officials said troops had fired several mortar rounds at militant hideouts.
A senior security official said the aim of the operation was to keep control of Khyber's main town and "clear it of elements making incursions into Peshawar, threatening CD and video shops and carrying out kidnaps for ransom."
Several CD shops have been blown up in recent months by militants seeking to impose Taliban-style Islamic law in the troubled tribal belt bordering Afghanistan and in the adjoining North West Frontier Province.
Security officials said Bagh's men had also been raiding trucks on the Khyber pass, the main supply route for US and NATO troops who are fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for Bagh's hardline Lashkar-e-Islam group said the security forces had demolished his house and the rebel group's headquarters in Bara.
"But we have decided not to fight them (security forces). We are not Taliban," the spokesman, Commander Wahid, told AFP.
The senior security official said authorities were deciding to push forward into the Tirah district, which is closer to the border with Afghanistan and where a Taliban-linked group, Ansar-ul-Islam, is active.
That group is under the sway of Pakistan's top Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, who on Saturday said he was halting two-month-old peace talks with the authorities because of operations against his men.
Mehsud is accused by authorities of orchestrating the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto in December.
However a spokesman for Mehsud also denied that Bagh was connected to the Taliban.
Pakistan has come under growing pressure to crack down on militants, with the United States and other NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan expressing concerns over the government's negotiations with the rebels.
Mehsud, who was named by Time Magazine this year in its list of the world's most influential people, has earlier vowed to continue attacking US and NATO troops in Afghanistan despite the peace talks.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said this week that the failure of Pakistan's new government to put pressure on Taliban forces on the Afghan border was a "concern."
