The offensive continued for its third day (AFP)

Additional Reporting By Asif Farooqi, IOL Correspondent

WANA, Pakistan, March 20 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Pakistani forces arrested 100 people in a northwestern area where up to 500 fighters are believed to be protecting a top Al-Qaeda leader, a military commander said Saturday, March 20.

"Over 100 people have been arrested including a certain number of foreigners," Lieutenant General Safdar Hussain, the commander of the operation in the South Waziristan border area, told reporters.

The commander gave no details on the identity of the militants captured in the offensive, entering its third day in the tribal area nearing the Afghan border.

Speculations rise high that a senior al-Qaeda figure could be among those cornered.

A helicopter was hovering over the town of Wana and firing on unspecified targets, where the militants are thought to be hiding there.

However, Pakistani and U.S. officials played down speculation it is Zawahri, and Pakistani officials in Islamabad were quoted by Aljazeera as saying that the target is a Chechen or Uzbek leader.

"The forces are acting on a tip from locals some days back that al-Qaeda second man Ayman Al-Zawahri took refuge in the area," intelligence sources have told IslamOnline.net correspondent in Pakistan.

"We put the area under surveillance and acted only after a concrete information that the target had arrived there last Monday," the sources said.

The sources said the "high-value target" – quoting President Pervez Musharraf as saying Thursday, March 18 - could have been wounded as there has been no attempt from his companions to escape the area.

"It looks that they have decided not to try and run away but put up fight till the last bullet” an official monitoring the operation in Wana closely from Islamabad told IOL.

There were reports from the scene of the fighting of a foreigner being driven away at high speed in a bullet-proof vehicle Tuesday as troops searching for tribesmen came under attack.

But a senior security official said Zawahiri may have narrowly escaped a raid that day while a Taliban spokesman claimed both Zawahiri and bin Laden were safe in Afghanistan.

Feeding Speculations

While the Pakistani troops closed in, diehard fighters were digging in for a "fight to the end", officials, who earlier suggested that al-Zawahiri could be among them, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Observers thought that news of capturing any top Al-Qaeda leaders before American presidential elections in November could turn the whole battle on incumbent president George W. Bush's side.

Further to feed speculations over the large operation, Britain has sent 100 SAS soldiers to Afghanistan, according to the Guardian daily Saturday.

The Americans have asked Britain to send hundreds more elite troops to support an intensified push to capture bin Laden, the British paper said, citing defense sources.

British intelligence officials were unable to confirm that Zawahri was among the trapped al-Qaeda fighters.

"It certainly looks as if there is someone important there," one said.

The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday doubled the reward for bin Laden's capture to 50 million dollars. A 25-million-dollar reward remains on the head of Zawahiri.

Zawahri reportedly resurfaced on February 24 in two taped messages on Arabic television networks. Qatari television Al-Jazeera broadcast a recording in which he warned Bush to step up security and threatened new attacks on the United States.

No Let-up

Local residents said there has been no let-up in the fighting, as Pakistani troops once again pounded the area with artillery at first light Saturday.

The militants besieged responded with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

"There was no pause in the firing," a resident of Wana town, to the east of the battle, told the BBC News Online just after dawn.

The broadcaster's correspondent in Pakistan said that civilians were killed and injured in the operation, expected to end within 24 hours.