The Pakistani army has killed 80 suspected militants in a dawn attack on a religious school near the Afghan border, a military spokesman said today.
The Pakistani army said the religious school or madrasa in Chenagai, 10 km (six miles) north of Khar, the main town in the Bajaur tribal region bordering Afghanistan, was being used as a militant training camp.
The strike killed almost everyone present in the madrassa, although at least three wounded were taken to hospital in Khar.
Residents said they had seen three or four army helicopters flying over Chenagai at around 5 a.m.
No prominent militant was believed to be in the compound when it was attacked, Sultan said. Security officials said Maulana Liaqatullah, the pro-Taliban commander who ran the madrasa, was among those killed.
While the Pakistani army claimed no children had been killed, a reporter in Chenagai described villagers wailing in grief as they collected mutilated bodies, some belonging to children as young as seven, from the rubble.
"The bodies are beyond recognition. They are badly mutilated. Limbs were being collected by local people in cloth sheets," the reporter told Reuters.
"There were pupils as young as seven who were also killed," said Syed Wali, a villager in Chenagai.
Thousands of tribesmen rallied in Khar chanting "Down with America," "Down with Bush" and "Down with Musharraf."
Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's most influential Islamist party, also condemned the attack.
Pakistan's lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border has been a haven for Islamist militants for decades and a large number of al Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas fled there after fleeing the US-led hunt for them in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001.
The attack came two days after some 3,000 militants held a rally near Khar, chanting slogans in support of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Talks between tribal elders and militants to reach a peace deal on the lines of the one struck in North Waziristan last month appeared to have failed, local clerics said.
A mountainous region that is difficult to access, Bajaur lies opposite Afghanistan's eastern province of Kunar, where US troops are leading the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Bajaur is the most north-easterly of seven semi-autonomous tribal regions that make up Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and are home to around 3.5 million people.