PAKISTAN’S MILITARY says it is scrambling to confirm a report on state television that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, has been killed.
The report yesterday said Mehsud, a target of CIA-directed drone attacks over the past month, had already been buried. The source of the information was not clear.
The main army spokesman, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, told the Guardianthat the army was trying to verify the report. "We don't have any confirmation yet," he said, adding that the PTV information did not come from "any state agency".
An elder in the Mamuzai area of Orakzai tribal agency said he attended Mehsud’s funeral on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. Speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, the elder said Mehsud died at his in-laws’ home.
A Reuters report, quoting a Pakistani intelligence official, said the Taliban leader may have been fatally wounded following a drone attack on January 17th on two vehicles in North Waziristan. However, yesterday a Taliban spokesman denied that Mehsud was dead. Speaking from northwest Pakistan he told Reuters: “It is a total lie.”
Mehsud’s fate has been the subject of intense speculation since a drone attack on January 13th on a remote madrasa on the border between South and North Waziristan.
A Taliban spokesman admitted that Mehsud had been in the building moments earlier, but insisted he had left before the American missile struck.
Days later Mehsud quelled rumours of his demise by phoning several Pakistani journalists in Peshawar. However, he was apparently targeted a second time in a drone strike on two vehicles in North Waziristan on January 17th.
Unconfirmed reports since then have suggested Mehsud was seriously injured in that strike and was shifted to his former stomping ground of Orakzai tribal agency for treatment.
The US has carried out drone attacks in the tribal belt over the past month. The salvo seems to have been triggered by the December 30th suicide bombing of a CIA base in southern Afghanistan that killed seven Americans spies, including the base chief.
A posthumous video released later showed the bomber, a Jordanian doctor, sitting alongside Mehsud, indicating that the Pakistani Taliban played a leading role in the CIA’s greatest humiliation for decades. The drone strikes are highly contentious in Pakistan, where they are viewed with naked hostility by the general public and as a necessary evil by the military.
Asked whether he was happy about the prospect of an American drone killing a Pakistani militant leader, Maj Abbas said: “I would be happier if he had been killed by our own security forces.”
– (Guardian service)