Pak terror chief who ordered attack on Malala killed by US
MULLAH RADIO Drone strike on Fazlullah, head of TehreekeTaliban Pakistan ISLAMABAD:
Pakistani Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah, who ordered the attack on Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, has been killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan, a senior intelligence official told the media on Friday.
Fazlullah, the head of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), was reportedly travelling in a vehicle with four commanders when they were targeted by a drone at 11 pm on June 13 in Kunar province, which borders Pakistan.
The drone strike was confirmed by Afghan defence ministry spokesperson Mohammad Radmanish. “A US drone strike in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar province has killed the leader of the TTP,” he told CNN.
Local media quoted Lt Col Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, as saying that a counterterrorism strike in Kunar on June 13 had “targeted a senior leader of a designated terrorist organization”. He did not identify the commander or name the group.
Fazlullah was named the TTP chief after commander Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in a drone strike in November 2013. He had a reputation as a ruthless commander prepared to do anything to enforce his uncompromising interpretation of Islamic law.
Also known as Mullah Radio for his fiery sermons on an illegal FM network, Fazlullah rose to prominence when he set up a parallel administration in Swat Valley of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in 2007. His followers operated courts that sentenced dozens of people to death, and his opponents were publicly executed and their bodies left at Swat’s main square. He had been on the run since his fighters were routed in a military operation in Swat in 2009.
Fazlullah had been designated a global terrorist by the US, which offered a bounty of $5 million for him in March. In 2012, the TTP under his command made an unsuccessful attempt to kill Malala Yousufzai, who had been writing a blog chronicling the horrors of life under the Taliban. Fazlullah was also blamed for ordering the 2014 assault on an army-run school in Peshawar that killed nearly 150 people.
The drone strike came amid a seven-day truce between the Afghan Taliban and government forces to allow citizens to observe the last days of Ramzan and the Eid holidays peacefully.