Police chief slain in suicide bomb onslaught

Elsewhere in the troubled region, the Pakistani army said it had killed 30 militants in an airstrike on a Taleban stronghold near the Afghan border.

Police official Gul Zareen said the suicide attacks occurred within minutes of each other in the district of Mansehra.

Police chief Khalil Khan died and two officers and two passers-by were wounded when an attacker blew himself up inside the police station in Mansehra.

In the second attack, two attackers stormed a police station about 15 miles away in the town of Balakot, triggering a shoot-out that left one of the terrorists dead.

Two officers were wounded in the Balakot shooting. Zareen said the dead insurgent was wearing a jacket adapted to carry explosives. The second attacker fled towards nearby offices, and officers launched a manhunt.

Islamic militants allied with al-Qaeda and the Taleban have stepped up attacks on police and security forces in recent weeks in addition to aiding attacks on Nato troops across the Afghan border.

However, such assaults are rare in Mansehra, which lies in a "settled area" 90 miles north-west of the capital Islamabad. Pakistan dismantled militant training facilities there following the 11 September attacks in 2001. Other large swathes of Pakistan's lawless north-west near the Afghan border have been virtually taken over by a faction of the Pakistani Taleban, including South Waziristan, where airstrikes took place yesterday.

An army statement said it targeted a militant hide-out in the Shawal mountains of South Waziristan on a tip off that insurgents were hiding there.

Shawal is believed to be one of an al-Qaeda and Taleban stronghold.

Although the government in December said the South Waziristan operation to break militant control had been completed, the army is still busy in search operations in the region.

The violence comes as Pakistan and the US appear to have made gains in the battle against al-Qaeda and the Taleban. Officials confirmed earlier in the week that the deputy Afghan Taleban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was arrested days before in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.