Pakistani authorities today sent tribal elders and clerics to negotiate with militants who are believed to have captured more than 100 soldiers in a northwestern region on the Afghan border.
The soldiers disappeared yesterday while travelling in trucks to the town of Ladha in South Waziristan.
Intelligence officials said the militants had taken the soldiers to different hideouts in the mountains.
Militants in South Waziristan released 18 paramilitary solders and one civilian official this week after holding most of them for nearly three weeks. Earlier, they killed one of the soldiers, videotaping a teenage boy cutting the man's head off.
The rugged Waziristan region is a hotbed of militant support and has never been brought under the writ of any government.
Many al-Qaeda and Taliban members took refuge in Waziristan and other remote regions on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border after US and Afghan opposition forces toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Violence in Pakistan, mainly in Waziristan and other parts of the northwest, has escalated since the collapse of a peace deal with militants and an army crackdown on a pro-Taliban mosque in the capital last month.