Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar is not in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan Province and the US should not carry out missile attacks in the region, a senior official said.
Western and Afghan officials have long suspected that Omar and other members of the Taliban government ousted by the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 have found refuge in or near the city of Quetta, Baluchistan’s capital.
Islamabad has challenged the US to provide it with any evidence of Omar’s whereabouts, insisting Pakistani forces will immediately move against the fugitive Taliban chief.
The New York Times reported this week that US officials were weighing extending missile strikes into Baluchistan in pursuit of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders who have shifted from militant strongholds farther north.
The head of the Baluchistan provincial government insisted on Friday that Mullah Omar was not there.
“A person who is making war against the NATO forces, he must be present in Afghanistan, in [the Afghan province of] Kandahar or somewhere,” Nawab Mohammed Aslam Raisani said.
Raisani added that “there is no justification for drone attacks in Quetta or other parts of Baluchistan.”
He said there was a distinction between Taliban militants fighting in Afghanistan and Taliban students studying peacefully in religious schools in Pakistan.
US officials said a stepped-up program of missile strikes into Pakistan’s unpoliced tribal belt along the Afghan frontier has killed a string of top al-Qaeda figures since last year.
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