KALAYA, Pakistan, May 31, (Agencies): Pakistani jet fighters struck militant hideouts in the Orakzai region on Monday, killing 42 insurgents, government and security officials said, the latest in a series of assaults on militants in the country’s northwest.
Warplanes attacked militant positions in three areas of the Orakzai region where government forces have intensified attacks in recent weeks after largely clearing Taleban strongholds in other areas.
“Our jet fighters carried out strikes after information that militants were present in these areas,” said one security official, who declined to be identified.
A government official, Nauman Khan, said 42 militants were killed and 18 wounded in the air assaults.
A Taleban spokesman, Hafiz Saeed, confirmed the attacks but denied any casualties, saying the jet fighters only bombed abandoned houses.
The military says several hundred Taleban fighters have been killed in Orakzai in recent weeks but there has been no independent confirmation of that. The Taleban usually dispute the army’s accounts of engagements. Despite heavy losses, militants have been to able to hit back and have carried out a wave of bomb and gun attacks, killing hundreds of people across the country.

Taleban militants killed between at least 84 people in attacks on worshippers from a minority religious group known as Ahmadis in two mosques of the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Friday.
And on Monday in Narowal, a town 80 kms (50 miles) northeast of Lahore, a man stabbed an Ahmadi man to death and wounded his son.
Police said they had arrested the attacker and were investigating whether the attack was religiously motivated or if it involved a personal feud.
The Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims, but many in Pakistan, including the government, do not. In 1974, Pakistan became the only Muslim state to declare Ahmadis non-Muslims and prohibited the open practice of their faith. After the Lahore attacks, a spokesman for the Pakistan Taleban said the Ahmadis had been targeted specifically for their faith, which includes the belief in other prophets after Mohammad.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan joined the US-led campaign against militancy after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Pakistani action against militants along the Afghan border is seen as crucial for US efforts to stabilise Afghanistan.

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KABUL: Nato said Monday that the second most senior Taleban commander in Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar had been killed in an air strike.
The man, identified as Haji Amir, was targeted in the province’s restive Panjwayi district Sunday, Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.
“An Afghan-international force used a precision air strike to kill Taleban commander Haji Amir, one of the two most senior Taleban leaders in Kandahar province,” an ISAF statement said.
Several of his fighters were also killed in the raid, it said.
Kandahar province is the hub of the Taleban’s insurgency, and was the informal capital of their brutal 1996-2001 regime.
An operation against the insurgents is building, with new deployments of US and Nato troops heading to Kandahar as Western commanders hope to neutralise the Taleban by the end of the year.
The statement said Amir had escaped from prison in Kandahar in 2008.
He had been tracked for “several days” before he was targeted in a mud hut in Zangabad village, it said. Nato said Amir operated in Kandahar’s Dand, Zhari and Panjwayi districts, all badly hit by the Taleban insurgency.
Amir had returned from Pakistan in April “to lead attacks against coalition and Afghan forces,” the statement added.
An Afghan tribal elder, Haji Agha Lalai — also a member of the Kandahar provincial council — told AFP that troops had killed a senior Taleban commander in Panjwayi whom he identified as Amir.