Baitullah Mehsud – Killed In U.S. Missile Strike
August 6, 2009 by national
Filed under World Report
UPDATE: As is often the case in stories of this nature coming out of the tribal areas, the storyline has again changed. Several sources are now reporting that Baiullah Mehsud is dead. Pakistan believes Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, was probably killed with his wife and bodyguards in a missile attack, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Friday.
An intelligence officer in South Waziristan told Reuters that Mehsud’s funeral had already taken place, while Pakistani media cited their own security sources saying Mehsud was dead.
“He was killed with his wife and he was buried in Nargosey,” the officer said, referring to a tiny settlement about 1 km (half a mile), from the site of the missile attack, believed carried out by a pilotless U.S. drone aircraft.
Malik said: “We suspect he was killed in the missile strike. We have some information, but we don’t have material evidence.”
UPDATE: Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was not killed in yesterday’s airstrike in South Waziristan, US intelligence officials told The Long War Journal.
“Baitullah is alive,” one official old The Long War Journal. “We’re aware of the reports that he might have been killed and we are looking into it, but we don’t believe he was killed.”
The late night airstrike on a compound operated by Ikramuddin Mehsud, Baitullah’s father-in-law, in the village of Zanghra in the mountains near Baitullah’s home town of Makeen, killed Baitullah’s second wife and two other Taliban fighters. One of Baitullah’s two brothers was also reported to have been killed.
Witnesses on the scene immediately said that Baitullah was not among those killed. He reportedly visited his wife but left an hour prior to the attack.
Original Post
US and Pakistani officials have said they are checking reports that the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, has been killed.
He is said to have died in a missile attack on the home of a relative.
A US official said there was “reason to believe reports of his death may be true, but it cannot be confirmed”.
Family members have already confirmed that one of Mehsud’s wives was killed when a US drone attacked her father’s home in South Waziristan on Wednesday.
The area is a stronghold of Mehsud, who has been blamed by Pakistan for a series of suicide bomb attacks in the country.
About 2,000 people have died in such attacks across the country since July 2007, when government forces besieged and captured a radical mosque in Islamabad from Mehsud’s loyalists.
Since then the Taliban in Pakistan have claimed responsibility for some of the worst attacks, but have always denied any role in the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in December 2007.
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