To shed some light on the deformation or damage processes active when paper made from carefully refined TMP long fibres and its fine material is loaded in the Z-direction and in-plane direction, specially designed grips with integrated acoustic emission sensors (AE sensors) were used to study the onset and progression of fracture. In this paper, experimental results from both Z-direction and in-plane tensile tests on three fractions of two TMP reject pulps are presented and discussed. Critical load, i.e. the load where fibre-fibre bonds starts to break, was shown to be approximately 80% of max strength and relatively independent of fine material content both in Z-direction and in-plane direction. In in-plan tensile fracture the fibre-fibre bonds are subjected to shear forces in contrast to loadings in through the thickness direction, where the bonds are loaded in a tensile mode. Addition of fines to the refined long fibre of the TMP reject has an evident effect of the bonds when loading in Z-direction, whereas the effect when loading in-plane is just marginal.