A major and an assistant director of the military-run Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) were killed in the attack, along with two other ISI officials and their driver, local intelligence official Moaz Khan told AFP.

"Masked men riding on a motorbike opened fire on the vehicle when the ISI officials were coming to Bajaur tribal district from (the northwestern city of) Peshawar," he said.

"They also lobbed two hand grenades at the vehicle and fled."

Security officials gave the men's ranks on condition of anonymity. They did not say what the ISI officials were doing in the area.

Military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said he had reports of three dead. "They were security elements," the general told AFP.

Bajaur, one of Pakistan's seven federally administered tribal zones bordering Afghanistan, was the scene of an alleged CIA missile strike which killed 18 people in January 2006.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's Egyptian deputy leader, was said to have escaped the attack.

Hundreds of Al-Qaeda militants and Taliban fugitives sneaked into the deeply religious tribal belt after the fall of the Islamist Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001.

The attack almost coincided with the abduction Tuesday of the principal of a high school in the nearby town of Tank, where a militant recruiter and a policeman died in a clash on Monday.

About a dozen armed pro-Taliban militants barged into the house of Farid Mehsud, principal of the Oxford Public School in Tank, which borders the restive South Waziristan tribal region, his relatives said.

They manhandled family members and whisked away Mehsud and his brother Humayun in waiting cars, a close relative of the abductees said, requesting not to be identified by name.

"If you destroy us you cannot expect safety," the relative quoted the gunmen as saying.

The principal on Monday had called for police protection after a group of militants visited his school and others in a bid to recruit youth to fight "jihad" or holy war against NATO and US forces in Afghanistan.

Earlier Tuesday, militants fired eight rockets at a paramilitary troop fort in Tank and troops retaliated, but the exchange of fire caused no casualties, officials said.

Militants recently torched video shops and banned barbers from shaving beards in northwestern Pakistan, fuelling concern about the "Talibanisation" of the already conservative area.

An airstrike on a madrassa in Bajaur in October killed 80 people. Officials said it was an Al-Qaeda training camp but locals said the victims were students.

Pakistan poured thousands of troops into parts of the tribal belt to combat militants who fled Afghanistan. Operations in the area have left 700 soldiers and 1,000 militants dead.

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