PESHAWAR: Militants bombed two schools in northwest Pakistan on Monday, police said, destroying the buildings in a region troubled by frequent Taliban attacks.

"A girls' primary school was bombed in Bhadha Bher village," police official Abdul Ghafoor Afridi told AFP, referring to a settlement on the outskirts of the northwestern capital Peshawar. The two-room building was razed, he said.

In another incident, insurgents bombed a boys' primary school in Khar, the main town of the Bajaur tribal district near the Afghan border.

"The school was totally destroyed because of the intensity of the blast. The Taliban planted locally-made explosives there early in the morning," said Adalat Khan, a tribal police official.

More than 40 schools have been bombed or set on fire in the past year in Bajaur, which is just west of Dir and Swat districts, where the military is locked in a nearly two-month offensive against Taliban insurgents.

Militants in Swat have destroyed nearly 200 schools, mostly for girls, in the valley during a two-year campaign to enforce sharia law. The Islamist extremists oppose co-education schools.

The army has said it is poised to launch an assault into the tribal areas along the Afghan border to track down senior Taliban leadership.

Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt has become a stronghold for hundreds of extremists who fled Afghanistan after a US-led invasion toppled the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001.