Pakistani fighter jets bombed a militant position in the Khyber region on the Afghan border on Saturday, killing at least 45 people, a senior member of a militant group in the region said.

The strike was carried out in the remote valley of Tirah, the militant, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

"They first hit a house where our people were present and minutes later, when people got there to remove bodies from the rubble, jets attacked again," the militant said.

He said the dead included both militants and civilians.

A military spokesman confirmed that aircraft bombed militant hideouts in the region but said he had no information about casualties.

"We anticipate that the number of dead would be high because the bombardment was very intense," Rehan Khattak, a senior government official in the region, told Reuters. "We're trying to get exact figures."

A semi-autonomous Pashtun tribal region, Khyber is a major route for Western supplies trucked from Karachi's port to landlocked Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass. Militants have frequently attacked convoys in the region.

Security forces have recently stepped up offensives in Khyber and neighbouring Orakzai regions to combat militants, who fled military sweeps in the Taliban strongholds of Swat, South Waziristan and Bajaur last year.

Militant attacks on supply convoys have forced the United States and its allies, who have forces in Afghanistan, to think of alternative routes.

Pakistani action against militants along the Afghan border is seen as crucial t

o U.S. efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan, particularly as Washington sends more troops to fight a raging Taliban insurgency before a gradual withdrawal starts in 2011.

SIDDIQUI'S DAUGHTER

Separately, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said a Pakistani girl left outside a house in Karachi on Sunday was the daughter of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who was convicted in a U.S. court for shooting at her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan.

Mariyam Siddiqui, 12, along with two siblings, has been missing since 2003, when her mother disappeared. Aafia Siddiqui resurfaced in Afghanistan in 2008 without her children.

"We have handed her over to the family. She is Aafia's daughter as her DNA result was positive," Malik told reporters in Islamabad.

Afghan authorities handed over Siddiqui's teenage son to Pakistan in September 2008. Another son is still missing.

Aafia Siddiqui, 37, was convicted in a New York court in February for grabbing a U.S. officer's rifle while she was being questioned in 2008 in Afghanistan and firing at FBI agents and military personnel before being wrestled to the ground.

Siddiqui, who spent years living in the United States, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who embarked for Washington to attend a summit on nuclear security, will take up Siddiqui's case with U.S. officials, Malik said.

(Additional reporting and writing by Kamran Haider; Editing by Chris Allbritton)