Pakistani troops storm army HQ to end hostage drama.

RAWALPINDI: Pakistani troops stormed army headquarters Sunday to end a day-long hostage drama, freeing 39 people held by militants who brazenly struck at the heart of the military establishment.

Thee hostages, two soldiers and four militants were killed in a rescue operation hailed by the military as "highly successful" despite a total of 19 killed since the rebels launched their assault.

Six soldiers and four other militants had already been killed in the 24-hour siege, which began Saturday in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and was the third dramatic militant strike in the nuclear-armed nation in a week.

The audacious attack exposed Pakistan s vulnerability in the face of a Taliban militia who have regrouped after the death of their leader and are determined to thwart an army assault on their tribal hideouts, analysts said.

Military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said troops went in at about 6:00 am (0000 GMT) and met with resistance from five militants barricaded in the building with captive security personnel.

"The operation is over. It was highly successful. We have rescued the hostages in an a large number," he told state-run television.

One militant fled, but was later injured by security forces and arrested, Abbas added. Another senior military official said 39 hostages had been freed, while three were killed in the rescue operation.

The military released photographs of the four militants killed Saturday, all young men with shreds of olive-green army uniforms still visible on the corpses.

The drama unfolded just before midday on Saturday, when nine Taliban gunmen in military uniform and armed with automatic weapons and grenades drove up to the compound and shot their way through one check post.

Four militants and six soldiers were killed near a second post but the rest of the rebels fled during the firefight, taking military employees hostage in a building near the army HQ in the city adjoining the capital Islamabad.

A security official requesting anonymity told AFP that a brigadier and a lieutenant-colonel were among the dead.

In London, visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the attack underlined the extremist threat in Pakistan -- on the frontlines of the US war on Al-Qaeda -- and officials here immediately blamed the Taliban.

"They are the enemies of Islam and Pakistan. All their actions are against the sovereignty of Pakistan," Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on a local television station.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement is based in the northwest tribal belt. The umbrella group of Islamist militia is blamed for most of the attacks that have killed more than 2,200 people in the country in two years.

The siege came after a suicide car bomb on Friday killed 52 civilians at a busy market in the northwest city of Peshawar.

Government ministers blamed that suicide attack on the Taliban, who have vowed to avenge the death of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a US drone missile attack in August and are keen to deter an assault on their stronghold.

The TTP also claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on Monday on a UN office in Islamabad that killed five aid workers.

The military is wrapping up a fierce offensive against Taliban rebels in the northwestern Swat valley launched in April, with the army now poised to begin a similar assault in the nearby semi-autonomous tribal belt near Afghanistan.

Political and defence analyst Hasan Askari said the militant strikes showed the army had not broken the back of the Taliban, as they claim.

"This shows weaknesses in the security arrangements of the state agencies and the determination and commitment of the extremist Taliban," he told AFP.

Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels who fled Afghanistan after the 2001 US-led invasion have carved out boltholes and training camps in the remote Pakistani mountains, with the TTP leadership also holed up in the rugged terrain.

Muscat Press and Publishing House SAOC 2009

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