Security officials from Wana after securing the release of the 12 captives on Sunday. (Reuters)

Wana (Pakistan), March 28 (Reuters): Pakistan forces retrieved 12 captive government men today after smashing an al Qaida-linked militant den and the troops agreed to lift a cordon around mud-fortresses that sheltered the Islamic radicals.

The 12 were captured by foreign fighters and their local allies last week at the start of a clash on Pakistan’s desolate Afghan border in which more than 100 people were killed and a notorious Uzbek al Qaida leader seriously wounded.

Two men still held captive would be released later today, said a tribal elder involved in the negotiation of their freedom.

“The army cordon is to be withdrawn today. We have almost achieved our set targets for the operation,” Mahmood Shah, the region’s security chief, said.

After cordening off the area with 5,000 troops and losing about 50 soldiers in the 12-day offensive, the Pakistani military said yesterday it smashed a den of fighters believed to include Uzbeks, Chechens, Arabs, Afghans and local Pashtun clansmen.

A senior al Qaida leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was wounded but escaped, military officials said. Yuldashev, the charasmatic leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, was accused of a series of bomb blasts in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in 1999.

“We have information that he is severely injured,” said Shah. “He is in our tribal area, we have information that this high-value target has not crossed the Pakistani border.”

Around 60 of the militants were killed and 162 captured in Pakistan’s biggest-ever offensive in its semi-autonomous tribal region. More than a dozen civilians are believed dead.

“Their hideouts are finished and the army is destroying their houses. Bulldozers are there,” information minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed said. “We will continue to hunt Yuldashev.”

Many of the militants are believed to have fled to other parts of the barren frontier, where about 50,000 Pakistani army troops have been deployed to hunt them. US forces are hunting the other side of the mountainous border in twin operations that come amid heightened worldwide anxiety over al Qaida attacks.

Troops had held fire in recent days to let a delegation of tribal elders talk peace and to negotiate the release of the 14 captured men, a move aimed at defusing tension by allowing local leaders to act as intermediaries under ancient tribal custom.

Pakistan, while supporting the US war on terror, had come under pressure for not doing enough to flush out militants who have been blamed for a campaign of violence in Afghanistan.

A wave of violence in which 600 people have died since last August in mainly southern and eastern Afghanistan was one reason why Afghan President Hamid Karzai had agreed to delay presidential and parliamentary elections to September from June.

The recent fighting was sparked when paramilitary forces hunting for Osama bin Laden and his al Qaida fighters ran into a hail of bullets on March 16 while approaching a suspect’s house near Wana, capital of the rugged South Waziristan region.