PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN - The Pakistani Taliban have taken dozens of local officials hostage, including police officers, paramilitary fighters and even state bank officials, and threatened Friday to begin executing them unless the government released four of their comrades captured last week.

The standoff has grown into one of the most serious recent challenges to the government's resolve to curb the militants' rapid expansion. The threat comes just 10 days before Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to meet President Bush at the White House.

So far, the government has held firm, sending hundreds of soldiers to the area, Hangu, in North-West Frontier Province, to engage in the first real fighting with the militants since the two sides agreed to a new series of peace deals earlier this year.

The fighting has resumed as the government faces mounting pressure from the United States to take stronger action against Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, which the militants use as launching pads for attacks against NATO and American troops in southern Afghanistan.

Pakistan's newspapers and television programs have been abuzz in the past few days about suggestions in Washington that the United States might act directly in the tribal areas to stop the flow of Taliban fighters into Afghanistan. Most Pakistanis would strongly oppose such a move as a violation of sovereignty.

But the militants have increasingly extended their presence into more settled areas of Pakistan, like Hangu, where the provincial police arrested about half a dozen armed Taliban riding in a pickup truck last Saturday.

In revenge, other Taliban kidnapped a variety of officials and are holding them in an undisclosed place. The Taliban said they were holding 49 hostages; the government said there were 29.

The militants' response was so ferocious because one of the Taliban arrested, to the surprise of the police, was a man known as Rafiuddin, a lieutenant of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, according to the inspector general of the provincial police, Naveed Khan.

The capture of Rafiuddin led to unusual and repeated demands from the Taliban for his release, Khan said. "That proves he means something to them," he said.

The spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Maulvi Omar, said in a telephone interview Friday that the Taliban were waiting for the results of mediation before deciding what to do with the hostages. "If there's no result, we will start killing them," he said.

Omar said Rafiuddin was a "religious scholar" at the sprawling Kahi madrasa in Hangu. "He's not a fighter," he said.

Omar also demanded the resignation of the new secular provincial government. It was elected in February, replacing a government dominated by religious parties sympathetic to the Taliban. If the government does not resign within five days, Omar said, the Taliban will take "organized action" against it.

Afrasiab Khattak, the provincial leader of the Awami National Party, which heads the province's government, dismissed the notion of releasing any of the captured Taliban, a stiffer stance than that taken by previous governments. "The government is not considering the release of anyone," he said.

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