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Bara Akakheil: Pakistani security forces took control on Sunday of a militant area in the Khyber region, a day after launching an offensive to push back gunmen threatening the city of Peshawar.
"It has been a successful operation. No collateral damage has been reported. The writ of the government has been established," top Interior Ministry official Rahman Malik said in Peshawar.
"Peshawar is totally safe. We won't allow anyone to disrupt the peace of the city," he told reporters.
The Khyber region is home to the Khyber Pass through which supplies for Western forces in Afghanistan pass, but traffic from Peshawar to the border had not been affected, an official said.
The region had been virtually free of militant violence until this year but security has deteriorated in recent months.
The offensive is the first major military action the new government has launched against militants since it took power after February elections.
Major-General Alam Khattack said on Saturday his forces were focused on Bara town, 15km southwest of Peshawar.
Paramilitary troops fired mortar bombs at militants on Saturday and blew up several positions, including the house of militant commander, Mangal Bagh. One militant was killed.
'Go home'
In recent weeks, Islamist vigilantes loyal to Bagh have been roaming into Peshawar neighbourhoods. Riding pick-up trucks, fighters wielding Kalashnikovs threatened music and video shop owners, and ordered barbers to stop shaving men's beards.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, whose government hopes to negotiate an end to militancy, said force was a last resort.
"In some places the option of dialogue was vanishing and no government can afford a parallel government," he said.
Bagh, who an official said had moved to the remote Tirah valley before the offensive, is not allied with Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, and his men are not known for crossing into Afghanistan to attack Western troops.
Bagh told The News newspaper his Lashkar-e-Islami would not fight the offensive: "I have told Lashkar-e-Islami volunteers to go home and not resist."
He said he did not know why security forces were attacking because his group did not harbour foreign militants or have links with the Taliban or Al Qaida.
Despite a curfew, some people in Bara were out in the main market although most shops were shut.
Paramilitary forces destroyed a handful of militant centres, including a radio station, and unearthed alleged torture rooms as they pressed ahead with the offensive against extremists near the Afghan border, officials said.
A spokesman for Pakistan's top Taliban commander threatened retaliation against the government's show of force and said peace talks would stay suspended.
The members of the paramilitary Frontier Corps have killed one attacker but encountered relatively little resistance overall since launching the operation on Saturday, officials said.
The troops destroyed at least four militant centers and uncovered a privately run jail, said Habibullah Khan, additional chief secretary for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Rehman Malik, head of the Interior Ministry, said forces destroyed a radio station used by the militants to broadcast propaganda.
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