According to the TTP, Khorasani’s vehicle was targeted by a roadside bomb on Sunday in the Afghan province of Paktika, on the border with Pakistan.
By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A top Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander, with a $3 million bounty on his head, has been killed in a roadside bombing in eastern Afghanistan, the group said.
The TTP on Monday confirmed that one of its top commanders Abdul Wali Mohmand, also known under the alias Omar Khalid Khorasani, who was behind some of deadliest attacks in recent years, was killed in a bombing in Afghanistan.
According to the TTP, Khorasani’s vehicle was targeted by a roadside bomb on Sunday in the Afghan province of Paktika, on the border with Pakistan.
At least two other commanders were also killed in the bombing which came exactly a week after a US drone strike in Kabul had killed Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The men were traveling in the Birmal district of the Afghan province of Paktika when their car hit a roadside mine on the evening of August 7.
The news comes at a time when Pakistani authorities are in contact with the militant group’s leadership to discuss a peace agreement. A truce has already been in place between the TTP and the Pakistani military for the past two months.
Khorasani is thought to have been close to Al Qaeda’s founding leader Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, but it wasn’t immediately known if there was any link between the drone strike and the bombing.
Khorasani belonged to Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal district and was said to be in charge of the Mohmand branch of the Pakistani Taliban.
At one point, he broke away from TTP and formed his own group, Jamaat ul Ahrar.
Under Khorasani’s command, Jamaat ul Ahrar has been one of the most operationally active TTP networks in Punjab, and has claimed responsibility for multiple attacks throughout Pakistan, according to the US State Department.
His group carried out some of the deadliest attacks in Pakistan, including a bombing in Lahore in 2016 that killed at least 75 people from the minority Christian community on an Easter Sunday.
Khorasani later dissolved Jamaat ul Ahrar and rejoined the TTP in a group’s drive to reunify several estranged groups.
The US State Department described him as a former journalist and poet who studied at several madrasas in Pakistan.
There has been a fragile truce holding between Islamabad and the TTP for the past two months as peace talks brokered by the Afghan Taliban’s Haqqani network take place.
The TTP has killed nearly 80,000 Pakistanis in almost two decades of violence.
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