Taliban warlord believed killed in US attack

Pakistan said yesterday it believed that wanted Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone attack, which if confirmed would score a coup in the US-led fight against Islamist militants.

The death of the notorious commander could deal a heavy blow to the sizeable Taliban movement commanded by Mehsud, who has a five-million-dollar US bounty on his head after Washington branded him "a key Al-Qaeda facilitator".

US and Pakistani officials accused Mehsud of masterminding the 2007 assassination of ex-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and he has been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people in bomb attacks over two years.

Senior officials in Pakistan's powerful security establishment who supervise operations in Mehsud's Waziristan stronghold said the warlord was dead, but the government said it was seeking verification.

"According to my intelligence this news is correct, but we are investigating," Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters. "To be 100 per cent sure, we are going for ground verification," he added.

"Information is coming from that area that he is dead," said Interior Minister Rehman Malik. "I am unable to confirm unless I have solid evidence," the Cabinet minister added.

The US also said yesterday it could not confirm that Mehsud had been killed, but White House spokesman Robert Gibbs conceded that "there seems to be a growing consensus among credible observers that he is indeed dead".

Tribesmen said on condition of anonymity that Mehsud was killed with his wife when a US drone fired two missiles into a family home in the Laddah area of South Waziristan on Wednesday. A kinsman had initially said he was "safe".

The US Central Intelligence Agency, with the tacit cooperation of Islamabad, has carried out dozens of attacks in Pakistan using unmanned Predator and Reaper drones over the past year, but declines to discuss the strikes publicly.

Islamabad and Washington have called liquidating Mehsud a strategic aim in the fight against Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked extremists whom the US has accused of posing an existential threat to nuclear-armed Pakistan.