US officials launched a broad legal offensive against Pakistan’s Taliban on Wednesday, placing the group on its international terrorism blacklist and charging its leader with planning last year’s suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA employees.
The Pakistani group, known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), was officially designated a “foreign terrorist organization,” a classification that imposes additional State and Treasury department sanctions.
The Pakistani Taliban threatens US national security, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a note published in the Federal Register.
The US Department of Justice then unsealed charges against the self-proclaimed emir of the TTP, Hakimullah Mehsud. He is accused of planning the attack in December last year in which a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a CIA base in Afghanistan, killing a Jordanian intelligence officer and the CIA employees.
Conviction on the two conspiracy charges, which were entered on Aug. 20, would likely mean life in prison.
“The various actions taken today against the TTP support the US effort to degrade the capabilities of this dangerous group,” US State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin said. “We are determined to eliminate TTP’s ability to execute violent attacks and to disrupt, dismantle and defeat their networks.”
The TTP has also been blamed for the failed May 1 car bombing in New York’s Times Square. Islamabad accuses the group of being behind the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the suicide bombing against the US consulate in Peshawar that killed six Pakistanis in April.
“These charges are part of a multi-pronged US government effort to disrupt and dismantle Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan,” Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said. “It is our intention to hold Mehsud accountable for his actions.”
The State Department is offering a US$5 million bounty for Mehsud and another top Taliban leader, Wali Ur Rehman, and the Treasury has placed financial and travel sanctions on Mehsud and others identified with the group.
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