Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s top Taleban commander, described by Times Online as “the country’s most wanted man”, has been killed in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) missile strike, officials disclose today.
The Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan, the group he headed, said the 35-year-old was killed early on Wednesday at his father-in-law’s house in South Waziristan.
According to Times Online the militant commander, who was reportedly blamed for dozens of suicide bombings and the murder of the former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto, has been seriously ill with a kidney ailment.
He was spending the night on the roof of the compound when the missiles, fired by an unmanned drone, hit in the early hours.
BBC News Online reports after the incident happened, the Taliban leader gathered in South Waziristan to choose a successor.
Local sources told the BBC reporter Abdul Hai Kakar, based in Peshawar, that the three candidates under the consideration for succeeding Baitullah Mehsud at the moment are Hakimullah Mehsud, Maulana Azmatullah, and Wali-ur-Rehman.
Shah Mahmood Quresh, Pakistani Foreign Minister said that no officials had yet seen Mehsud’s body, but the authorities would send a team to the site of the strike to verify his death.
Mr Qureshi said: “To be 100-per cent sure, we are going for ground verification and once the ground verification re-confirms, which I think is almost confirmed, then we’ll be 100-per cent sure,” Times Online reports.
According to the BBC Kafayat Ullah, who was described as an aide to Baitullah Mehsud, told the Associated Press by telephone on Friday 7 August, that his leader had been killed along with his second wife by a US missile, but he has no further details.
Zahid Hussain wrote on the Times Online that Mehsud is reportedly thought to have had some 20,000 men under his command and had a $5 million US bounty on his head after Washington branded him “a key al-Qaeda facilitator”.
Only until last month, the US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, branded him “one of the most dangerous and odious people in the entire region”.
An intelligence source in South Waziristan said that Mehsud had already been buried after the strike in Zangar village in the Ladha region.
The Taliban military group emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
The Taliban is a predominantly Pashtun movement, and came to prominence in Afghanistan in the autumn of 1994.
In recent years, the re-emergence of the hardline Islamic Taliban movement has been regarded as a fighting force in Afghanistan and a major threat to Pakistani government.
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