PAKISTAN - PASTIKANI security forces captured and wounded top Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Mansoor Dadullah in southwestern Pakistan early on Monday, a police chief said.

Dadullah was seized near in the village of Gowal Ismail Zai in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, near the border with Afghanistan, provincial police chief Saud Gohar told reporters.

'He has been wounded and arrested early this morning. He resisted when our men launched an operation,' Mr Gohar said.

The operation was carried out jointly by police and anti-terrorist forces, he added.

Dadullah had succeeded his elder brother - the Taliban's top military commander Mullah Dadullah - who was killed in an Afghan and Nato operation in southern Afghanistan in May 2007.

The Taleban said in a statement late December that they had sacked the commander 'because he disobeyed orders of the Islamic Emirate' of the Taleban.

But a spokesman for the commander denied that he was fired, leading to speculation of infighting among the rebels.

This came at the same time that media reports emerged that British intelligence agents were involved in talks with senior Taleban in Helmand, although it was never clear who they might have been.

The Afghan government expelled a senior European Union diplomat and a UN official late December amid claims they had contacts with the Taliban.

The announcement comes a day after US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned that Taleban and Al-Qaeda militants in the country's border regions posed a direct threat to the Islamabad government.

Pakistan on Saturday dismissed a senior but unnamed US official's assertion that Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden were operating from regions along the Afghan border. -- AFP