The bombers on motorbikes targeted an administration compound in Ghalalnai, the main town in the tribal district of Mohmand, about 175 kilometres (110 miles) northwest of the federal capital Islamabad and near the Afghan border.[break]
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but suspicion fell on the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist networks bitterly opposed to the government and 140,000 US-led NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan.
"There are 40 dead and up to 60 wounded," Amjad Ali, a senior administration official in Mohmand district, told AFP by telephone.
About 25 seriously wounded people have been transferred for medical treatment in Peshawar, the main city in northwestern Pakistan, he said.
Washington considers Pakistan´s lawless northwestern tribal belt a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda and the area is the focus of a covert American drone war targeting senior Taliban militant commanders.
More than 100 people were believed to have been in the compound where government officials, allied tribal elders and members of local anti-Taliban militia were meeting as the bombers struck.
Local official Maqsood Amin told AFP that the building was badly damaged.
"At least two rooms and a verandah were demolished," he said.
Pakistan has long armed and supported tribesmen in a key strategy designed to protect local communities from Taliban encroachments across the northwest.
Doctor Jahangir Khan at the local hospital in Ghalalnai said 31 corpses had been brought in after the attacks and confirmed that 60 were wounded.
It was the second suicide attack in five months targeting Mohmand tribal elders allied to the government. On July 9, a suicide car bomb attack killed 105 people in the town of Yakaghund, also in the region.
Around 4,000 people have been killed in suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan since government forces raided an extremist mosque in Islamabad in 2007. The attacks have been blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks.
But Mohmand official Shamsul Islam dismissed suggestions that security had been too lax to stop the suicide bombers who travelled by motorbike.
"Routine security arrangements were in place. It is difficult to stop suicide bombers, they can go anywhere," he told Pakistan´s Geo television.
"There was a meeting under way between the local administration chief and tribal elders, members of the peace committee (anti-Taliban militia) when the blast took place," local official Maqsood Amin told AFP.
The first suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance and the second inside the compound, he added.
Pakistan flatly denies US suggestions it is not doing enough to tackle Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants who have carved out strongholds in the northwest and last year inched closer to the capital Islamabad.
According to Pakistani military statistics, 2,421 army and paramilitary soldiers were killed in fighting from 2002 until April this year.
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