Officials said 71 students and nine staff from an army-run college were rescued when militants moved them from North Waziristan to South Waziristan -- lawless tribal zones on the Afghan border where Al-Qaeda is known to be active.
Sardar Abbas Rind, administrative chief in Bannu town where the students had been headed, said troops intercepted gunmen before dawn at a military checkpost 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the college.
"There was an exchange of fire after which the militants fled. All students and teaching staff members were rescued," he said.
But Javed Iqbal Paracha, principal of the targeted college, said a handful of students remained unaccounted for. It was unclear whether they were in Taliban hands or had escaped elsewhere in the region.
Officials near the college, in the town of Razmak in North Waziristan, said the students were aged between 15 to 25.
The students left their college on Monday after it closed for the summer and were in a convoy of about 30 vehicles when armed Taliban ambushed the convoy, Rind said. Many of the buses managed to get away, he added.
Details of the incident have been hazy and officials gave wildly divergent numbers of how many students went missing, ranging from 20 to 400.
On Tuesday, gunmen in Peshawar stormed a factory owned by a senior minister of North West Frontier Province, kidnapping eight workers and killing a guard who resisted, police said.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but the factory´s chief executive Ghazanfar Bilor pointed the finger at the Taliban.
Such incidents have fuelled fears of revenge attacks for a month-long Pakistan offensive against the Taliban in the northwest.
"Whenever there is an army operation, such types of reactions are normal and we should be prepared for such retaliations in the future," said Ikram Sehgal, a security analyst and newspaper columnist.
The military campaign, now in its sixth week, was launched when Taliban fighters advanced to within 100 kilometres (60 miles) of Islamabad, flouting a deal to put three million people under sharia law in exchange for peace.
More than 80 people have been killed in bomb blasts across the country since the operation began on April 26.
Pakistan´s military said Tuesday that troops were fighting inside the Taliban stronghold of Charbagh, 20 kilometres from the Swat valley´s main town Mingora, which the government said it had won back over the weekend.
"Helicopters shelled eastern parts of Charbagh while ground forces are busy clearing the outskirts," said a military official, who did not want to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media.
The United States, which has strongly backed the operation, is sending special envoy Richard Holbrooke to Pakistan on Wednesday to examine the humanitarian crisis and meet some of the up to 2.4 million people displaced.
Helping Pakistan root out extremism is a top US priority, and ties were likely ruffled after a lawyer said that a court in Pakistan ordered the release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed and three other allies.
Saeed founded the outlawed Kashmiri militant Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which India blamed for the November attacks. Dawa is widely seen as a front for LeT, which is banned.
Pakistan put Saeed and several top Dawa leaders under house arrest in early December when police closed offices of the charity across the country after the UN Security Council blacklisted the organisation as a militant group.
"The arrest violated the constitution, therefore Hafiz Saeed and his colleagues are being released," lawyer A.K. Dogar told reporters.
India said it was unhappy with the decision to release Saeed. The United States also views the charity as a terror group.
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